Development of a surrogate model for uncertainty quantification of compressor performance due to manufacturing tolerance

Abstract

In gas turbines and jet engines, stagger angle and tip gap variations between adjacent blades lead to the deterioration of performance. To evaluate the effect of manufacturing tolerance on performance, a CFD-based uncertainty quantification analysis is performed in this work. However, evaluating dozens of thousands of rotor assembly through CFD simulations would be computationally prohibitive. A surrogate model is thus developed to predict compressor performance given an ordered set of manufactured blades. The model is used to predict the influence of tip gap and stagger angle variations on maximum isentropic efficiency. The results confirm that the best arrangement is obtained by minimizing the stagger angle variation between adjacent blades, and by maximizing the tip gap variation. Another finding is that the best arrangement yields the lowest variability, the range of maximum efficiency being 4 times sharper (resp. 2 times) than worst arrangement for stagger angle variations (resp. tip gap variations). Not measuring manufacturing tolerance, or not specifying any strategy for the blade arrangement, lead to variability as large as the worst arrangement.