A Rapid Test Facility for Transonic Compressors and Fans

This paper provides design recommendations for a rapid test facility for transonic compressors and fans, which aims to enable the testing of new geometries in two weeks at a cost of less than $10k. This compares to current industrial test facilities which typically take years and cost around $10M. The approach is important for its potential to unlock creativity allowing designers to ‘play’ at engine-representative conditions. This paper is in two parts. The first part aims to physically enable rapid high-speed testing while preserving the key fluid dynamic mechanisms being studied. The complexity of a facility scales with its power input, driven by safety requirements and complex operations. A turboexpander-type subscale facility is designed to reduce the power by a factor of nine while achieving the full Mach number and a half of the full Reynolds number. The second part aims to shorten the testing cycle time to under two weeks. It analyses the current testing process to identify the time-consuming parts and makes design changes to either eliminate or optimise each process. The final test facility was demonstrated in a trial where an example rotor geometry with a tip Mach number of 1.2 was manufactured, built, and tested. The new geometry was tested in 2 weeks, incurring a marginal cost of less than $7k.