Flow Instability and its Control in Compression Systems

This paper reviews the development in the research of flow instability and its control over the recent ten or more years. This development was largely stimulated by the novel idea of active control of the aerodynamic instability in compressors. Three topics are covered in the paper, which appeared as the major themes towards the goal of stability enhancement. The first topic is the pre-stall behavior of rotating stall, which plays a vital role in designing the control scheme and discovering the convenient route to find the causal factors of flow disturbances potentially leading to stall. The second topic is the mechanism of blade passage flow during stall and its inception, which is the basic knowledge needed to manipulate the blade design for the stability improvement and eventually to predict the unsteady performance of the compressor system. The third topic is the recent trend of the control strategy based on the learning of active vs. passive methods. To introduce to the discussion of these topics, a brief description of the history of the recent development is given at the beginning of the paper. In discussing each topic, future works are also highlighted to enhance the further development of this long-standing problem in turbomachinery research and application.