Response of an axial compressor to distorted inlet flow

A model representing rotating or fixed blade rows, which is similar to a pseudo-two-dimensional semiactuator disk model, is coupled to a fully unsteady nonlinear numerical method. It has been developed for the computation of three-dimensional compressible inviscid nonuniform flows in the turbomachines. Numerical results, which have been obtained on the vector processor CRAY 1, are presented in the case of a low speed single stage compressor with an inlet steady total pressure distortion. They show that this numerical approach is able to foresee the place and the time where strong decelerations occur from which rotating stalls could originate.