Design and Experimental Study of High-Speed Low-Flow-Rate Centrifugal Compressors

摘要

This paper describes a design and experimental effort to develop small centrifugal compressors for aircraft air cycle cooling systems and small vapor compression refrigeration systems (20-100 tons). Efficiency improvements at 25% are desired over current designs. Although centrifugal compressors posses excellent performance at high flow rates, low-flow-rate compressors do not have acceptable performance when designed using current approaches. The new compressors must be designed to operate at a high rotating speed to retain efficiency. The emergence of the magnetic bearing provides the possibility of developing such compressors that run at speeds several times higher than current dominating speeds.