Effect of guide vane in ring groove arrangement for a small turbocharger

A high-pressure ratio and a wide operating range are highly required for a turbocharger in diesel engines. Ring groove arrangement is effective for flow range enhancement of centrifugal compressors. Two ring grooves on the suction pipe and the shroud casing wall are connected by means of the annular passage, and the stable recirculation flow is formed at small flow rates from the downstream groove toward the upstream groove through the annular bypass. It is well known that the ring groove arrangement shows the following two merits; (1) the formation of recirculation flow removes the low energy fluid around the downstream groove located near the splitter blade leading edge, (2) the flow incidence can be reduced because the recirculation flow merges again with the incoming main flow upstream of the impeller inlet. In the present study, the ring groove arrangement was applied to the high speed centrifugal compressor, in addition, in order to suppress too large pre-whirl due to the recirculation flow, the effects of guide vane installed in the annular passage and the ring groove configuration on the pre-whirl were analyzed numerically. The numerical flow analysis was carried out by using the commercial code produced by ANSYS-CFX. The simulation results show the multi-ring grooves are fairly effective in combination with the suitable configuration of guide vanes for improvement in the inlet velocity distortion.