Evaluation of Unsteady CFD Methods by Their Application to a Transonic Propfan Stage

The accuracy in predicting the unsteady aerodynamic blade-row-interaction of two state-of-the-art Navier-Stokes codes is evaluated within the current paper. The general flow features of the test case — a transonic research propfan stage — are described in brief as far as necessary to understand the detailed comparisons. The calculated unsteady velocity and flow angle distributions at various axial planes of the stage are compared to data from unsteady laser measurements. The general flow features of the propfan are very well reproduced by the numerical methods and a good agreement is also obtained in comparison to the measured data. One important outcome of the comparison is the good agreement of both numerical methods with the unsteady fluctuations measured in the experiment.