Design and Development of an Industrial Centrifugal Compressor

A Design and Developmental work on an Industrial Centrifugal Compressor was carried out in CLOCTER facility,Propulsion Division.The compressor was designed to deliver 6.4kg/sec of air at 8,900RPM, developing a pressure ratio of 1.346 with an isentropic efficiency of 0.7.The initial part of this report is devoted to the design and fabrication of a backward curved impeller,a parallel walled vaneless diffuser and a matching volute chamber.The subsequent part deals with developmental tests on this compressor in a closed loop and as well as in three different open loop configurations of the rig.The duct resistance of the rig played an important role in limiting the range of the compressor.In otherwords, the desing mass flow could not be pushed through the compressor in all cases except in one case where the inlet is provided with a short pipe and a bellmouth.During the experimental programme,the test data was collected in an automatic DAS and then reduced to the required form using an online computer.It has been found that at the design massflow and speed conditions, the compressor developed a pressure ratio of 1.36 with an efficiency of 0.769.This clearly indicates that the design approach adopted is a conservative one with the assumption of lower slip factor,lower efficiency and higher losses in the compressor components