High-pressure multistage centrifugal compressors are used extensively in the energy industry across a wide variety of applications from refinery processes to gas injection for carbon capture and sequestration. Centrifugal compressor manufacturers are looking towards reduced radial and axial dimension compressors to meet customer’s demands for lower cost and higher reliability. As the dimensions of the centrifugal compressors shrink, the job of the return channel—which must turn the flow by 180° and remove the tangential component of the flow—becomes more difficult.
MIT, in collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), is developing a novel return channel design for these multistage compressors with the objective of improving efficiency, while meeting geometry constraints.
Opportunities to improve “traditional” return channel design were identified in a previous investigation and qualitative best practices established. A quantitative assessment of these best practices is being undertaken, and use of an adjoint method to optimize the return channel shape is also under consideration. Candidate designs obtained with this adjoint method would then be refined to develop a design that addresses the desired performance improvements. Performance of the candidate design are to be assessed in a full-scale stage test at the MHI single-stage test facility.