This paper presents the application of a new exergy balance decomposition allowing to explicitly isolate the compressible and thermal contributions to overall efficiency for the NASA rotor 37 performance analysis. Firstly, the theoretical aspect of this new decomposition is discussed in detail, including the expressions, interpretations and figures of merit associated to the different components. Secondly, one operating regime at 98% of the choke mass flow rate of the rotor 37 is investigated. This will particularly emphasize the trends obtained for the thermally- and mechanically-recoverable components of the overall exergy outflow (respectively impacted by entropy generation and pressure/velocity differences with respect to the system’s thermodynamic dead state). Finally, the analysis of the exergy-based characteristic of the compressor is refined with respect to the one based on the original mechanical/thermocompressible decomposition. In particular, it is found that the impact of the thermally-recoverable exergy outflow on the prediction of the compressor efficiency is non-negligible, as it corresponds to roughly 0.4% of the computed compressor rotor stage overall efficiency. As this component is only convertible into mechanical work by means of a heat engine (not available in current-generation aircraft engines), isolating the thermally-recoverable component is thus essential in exergy-based performance analyses.
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Berhouni et al. (2024) studied this question.