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Abstract Hydrogen economy is no more a futuristic need, rather it is the need of the hour to combat climate change. However, the scale, accessibility and price of the clean fuel are the main challenges to be overcome for its widespread adaptation. In order to accelerate the journey towards net-zero, the compression, storage and transportation of hydrogen are going to be critical to balance the supply and demand scenarios, and to ensure hydrogen enters new energy markets like refueling stations, green ammonia production and power generation, apart from the existing markets like fertilizer industry. Hydrogen being the lighter and low-density gas, its compression with traditional technologies such as centrifugal and reciprocating compressors demand new design philosophies to meet the new energy market’s needs. New generations of high efficient centrifugal compressor stages are needed to meet such requirements, including a new target for the peripheral speed that has to be increased beyond the current limits to reach a high head rise per stage. This paper presents numerical and experimental aeromechanic studies on high peripheral speed impellers for hydrogen centrifugal compressors. High frequency mode shapes that are typical for these applications were excited at low peripheral speed using an innovative approach. Under similitude condition, the experimental studies were carried out at Authors’ internal test facility, revealing that even at low speed, the higher frequency domain, like hydrogen compression one, can be properly excited. Steady state and transient numerical simulations were carried out, considering a complete stage composed by the upstream return channel, the impeller, the diffuser, and the downstream return channel. The results were then compared against the experimental outcomes, obtaining a successful validation that will be widely discussed in the paper.
Venkatachalam et al. (Mon,) studied this question.