Study On Profiles Of The Centrifugal Compressor With Variable Inlet Guide Vanes

Recently, with the development of heavy industry, centrifugal compressor has become the key of the compression and transmission of high pressure gas gradually. However, in the actual operation of the centrifugal compressor, the climatic conditions and the user’s needs always change, we often need to control the flow of gas entering the compressor. Install the inlet guide vanes in the first stage of the centrifugal compressors is a common and effective way to adjust the mass flow. However, the design of traditional guide vanes has limited setting range of mass flow which will lead to enormous waste when a large proportion of compressed gas was emitted due to the reduced customer demand for mass flow in winter. For example, in China there is a manufacture factory whose compressors’gas emission is as much as30%, while the foreign advanced design only emits15%.So the research of the design method of VIGV is the key technique that needed to be resolved.The flow inside the centrifugal compressor stage, equipped with VIGV, was investigated with commercial software NUMECA in order to meet the requirements of mass flow regulation performance. Results show that comparing with the original guide vanes, the power consumption and efficiency of the compressor stage with modified VIGV show little change, but the mass flow regulation range can be expanded; the regulation capability of curved VIGV is higher than straight VIGV. And the research shows that the mass flow regulation range of the curved VIGV NACA6512is the largest, the mass flow regulation range is increased by17.45%in summer and7.64%in winter. Appropriate profile of VIGV can reduce the mass flow effectively and such save the running cost in the operation of the centrifugal compressor.