Aerodynamic performance of a coolant flow off-take downstream of an OGV

Within the compression system of a gas turbine engine a significant amount of air is removed to fulfil various requirements associated with cooling, ventilation and sealing. Flow is usually removed through off-takes located in regions where space is restricted, whilst the flow is highly complex containing blade wakes, secondary flows and other flow features. This paper investigates the performance of a pitot style off-take aimed at providing a high pressure recovery in a relatively short length. For this to be achieved some pre-diffusion of the flow is required upstream of the off-take (i.e. by making the off-take larger than the captured streamtube). Although applicable to a variety of applications, the system is targeted at an intercooled aero-engine concept where the off-take would be located aft of the fan Outlet Guide Vane (OGV) root and provide coolant flow to the heat exchangers. Measurements and numerical predictions are initially presented for a baseline configuration with no off-take present. This enabled the OGV near field region to be characterised and provided a datum, relative to which the effects of introducing an off-take could be assessed. With the off-take present a variety of configurations were investigated including different levels of pre-diffusion, prior to the off-take, and different off-take positions. For very compact systems of short length, such that the gap between the OGV and off-take is relatively small, the amount of pre-diffusion achievable is limited by the off-take pressure field and its impact on the upstream OGV row. This pressure field is also influenced by parameters such as the non-dimensional off-take height and splitter thickness. The paper analyses the relative importance of these various effects in order to provide some preliminary design rules. For systems of increased length a significant amount of flow pre-diffusion can be achieved with little performance penalty. However, the pre-diffusion level is eventually limited by the increased distortion and pressure losses associated with the captured streamtube.