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Abstract The performance and reliability of a compressor can be adversely affected by its inlet conditions. In this paper, the effect of planar wave on a two-stage axial compressor is investigated experimentally with aperiodic inlet dynamic distortions generated by the insertion and extraction of a plate at the compressor inlet. The transient pressure is measured by the high-response static pressure sensors at different axial and circumferential positions in the flow path. It is found that the inlet distortion is attenuated greatly by the IGV cascade, and then behaves as a planar wave at the inlet of the first stage. At the near-stall operating point, the axial compressor gets through the unstable condition with a hysteresis loop in the performance map by the inlet planar pressure ramp. The hysteresis loop, including asymmetric stall development and recovery processes, is discussed. The sudden pressure increase is found at the beginning of the loop and it could be used as a pre-cursor of stall inception. The inertia of the flow in the loop is discussed with the so-called lag parameter. The inertial effect is more evident in the stall development process than in the recovery process. It is believed that the experimental method with the distortion generation way could be applied widely in the study of the unstable operation characteristics of axial compressors.
He et al. (Mon,) studied this question.