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Abstract The growing shift towards renewable energy sources has underscored the need for large-scale, environmentally sustainable energy storage solutions. Among these solutions, the Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO2) power cycle has emerged as a promising avenue for advanced energy conversion. In such systems, the performance of the compressor is critical to the overall system’s performance and efficiency. A multistage axial compressor has been designed using an optimization-based methodology and the first stage of this design has been built and tested experimentally. This paper compares rigorous computational simulations with detailed experimental data including the readings from total pressure rakes, total temperature rakes, mass flow measurements and casing static pressure measurements. In addition, average measured tip clearance values are used in the simulations along with the detailed prescription of the experimental boundary conditions. The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations do show very good comparison with the data. Additionally, the study serves as a robust validation of the design and optimization process, as the experimental results closely mirror the CFD predictions. Furthermore, computational simulations offer a deeper understanding of the associated flow physics within the compressor. The real gas effects of (sCO2) are also studied and described in how they affected the design and testing, especially considering running to the right corrected flow and corrected speed. Reynolds number effects are also studied and described.
Ghimire et al. (2024) studied this question.