Acoustical Methods for Investigating Turbocharger Flow Instabilities

Raimo Kabral; Hans Rammal; Mats Abom

doi:10.4271/2013-01-1879

In order to increase the internal combustion engine efficiency turbocharging is today widely used. The trend, in modern engine technology, is towards higher boost pressures while keeping the combustion pressure raise relatively small. The turbocharger surge occurs if the pressure at the outlet of the compressor is greater than it can maintain, i.e., a reverse flow will be induced. In presence of such flow conditions instabilities will occur which can couple to incident acoustic (pressure) waves and amplify them.

The main objective of the present work is to propose a novel method for investigation of turbocharger flow instabilities or surge precursors. The method is based on the determination of the acoustic two-port data. The active part of this data describes the sound generation and the passive part the scattering of sound. The scattering data will contain information about flow-acoustic interaction and amplification of sound that could occur close to surge.

Here the existence of such amplification will be investigated for a compressor operating at different operating points including points near the surge line. In addition the generated sound for reflection-free conditions is also investigated on both the up- and downstream side. All the measurements have been carried out in the unique CCGEx test rig for two-port testing of turbo-compressors.

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Acoustical Methods for Investigating Turbocharger Flow Instabilities 2013-01-1879

SAE MOBILUS