Open Access

ARTICLE

Effects of Tip-Clearance Variation on Blade Deformation, Near-Tip Flow, and Entropy Generation in a Transonic Compressor

Yongjie Wang, Junli Wang^*, Zhigui Ren, Wenshuai Liu, Wei Kong, Chenxing Niu, Chang Yang

School of Mechanical Engineering, Shaanxi University of Technology, Hanzhong, China

* Corresponding Author: Junli Wang. Email:

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2026, 22(9), 7 https://doi.org/10.32604/fdmp.2026.089646

Received 22 July 2026; Accepted 10 September 2026; Issue published 28 September 2026

Abstract

This study investigates how tip-clearance variation affects blade deformation, aerodynamic performance, near-tip flow structures, and irreversible energy loss in a transonic compressor. NASA Rotor 37 is used as the research model, and a two-way fluid–structure interaction framework coupled with entropy-generation analysis is developed to resolve the interplay between structural deformation and tip-leakage flow. At the respective peak-efficiency operating points, increasing the nominal tip clearance from 1.0δ to 3.0δ produces little change in the chordwise-averaged radial blade displacement, which decreases from 0.0725 to 0.0713 mm. However, the corresponding deformation-corrected effective clearance increases substantially, from 0.2835 to 0.9967 mm, leading to reductions in total pressure ratio and isentropic efficiency and a decrease of approximately 66.7% in the range of numerically converged steady-state solutions. The enlarged effective clearance also intensifies tip-leakage flow, promotes the development of the primary tip-leakage vortex, broadens the leakage shear layer, and strengthens the interaction among near-tip vortex structures. Entropy-generation analysis shows that turbulence-related entropy generation accounts for more than 98% of the calculated total and is the dominant modeled source of irreversible loss under the investigated conditions. As tip clearance increases, the contribution of the tip region to total entropy generation rises from 18.5% to 33.2%, while the region affected by tip leakage extends farther into the passage and the highest-loss region becomes increasingly concentrated near the casing.

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Keywords

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