Visualization of transient three-dimensional flow field with rotating stall in a diagonal flow fan

An Unsteady flow field with rotating stall cells in a high specific-speed diagonal flow fan has been investigated experimentally. Although a general feature of stall cells has already indicated, i.e., the number of stall cells is one and its propagating speed is approximately 80 percent of rotor speed, little has been known about the flow field when a rotating stall occurs because of its unsteadiness. In order to capture the behavior of the rotating stall cell, measurements of the flow field at the rotor inlet were carried out with a single slant hot-wire. Those data were processed by a so-called “double phase-locked averaging” (DPLA) technique, which enabled to capture the flow field of the cell in the reference co-ordinate system fixed to the rotor. As a result, time-dependent ensemble averages of the three-dimensional velocity components at the rotor inlet have been obtained and the behavior of the rotating stall cell has been illustrated with each velocity component.