Viscous Analysis of Three-Dimensional Rotor Flow Using a Multigrid Method

A three-dimensional code for rotating blade-row flow analysis has been developed. The space discretization uses a cell-centered scheme with eigenvalue scaling for the artificial dissipation. The computational efficiency of a four-stage Runge–Kutta scheme is enhanced by using variable coefficients, implicit residual smoothing, and a full-multigrid method. An application is presented for the NASA rotor 67 transonic fan. Due to the blade stagger and twist, a zonal, nonperiodic H-type grid is used to minimize the mesh skewness. The calculation is validated by comparing it with experiments in the range from the maximum flow rate to a near-stall condition. A detailed study of the flow structure near peak efficiency and near stall is presented by means of pressure distribution and particle traces inside boundary layers.