Aerodynamic Characterization of an Industrial Inlet Particle Separator for Turboshaft and Turboprop Engines

Inlet Particle Separators (IPS) can be installed at the intake of turboprop and turboshaft engines as filtering protections, ensuring improved performance and operational stability in challenging environments. To validate and characterize novel IPS designs, it is essential to assess their performance before integrating them into the aircraft powerplant. In this paper, we aim at providing the experimental and numerical characterization of an IPS designed for industrial applications, defining a methodological approach that can be applied to similar test cases, as well as for training reduced order models. A comprehensive test campaign was undertaken at the von Karman Institute to analyze the pressure loss and separation efficiency of the IPS within an innovative test rig. This facility enables the exploration of different geometrical configurations and IPS flow regimes, mirroring real-world application and environmental conditions. The investigation mainly focused on parameters such as Reynolds number, bypass ratio and Stokes number. Both steady and unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations with Lagrangian particle tracking were also performed, with two levels of resolution (based on the grid size), to gain more insights on the flow and particle trajectories inside the channels, and to complement the experimental findings. The reliability of the numerical tools is validated by comparing the CFD results with the experimental data. The authors specifically discuss on the discrepancies between the numerical and experimental outcomes in certain flow configurations, reasoning on the uncertainty analysis of the experimental data, and on potential deficiencies of the chosen CFD models.