ALBERT

Description: The Panel Code for Planar Cascades was developed as an aid for the designer of turbomachinery blade rows. The effective design of turbomachinery blade rows relies on the use of computer codes to model the flow on blade-to-blade surfaces. Most of the currently used codes model the flow as inviscid, irrotational, and compressible with solutions being obtained by finite difference or finite element numerical techniques. While these codes can yield very accurate solutions, they usually require an experienced user to manipulate input data and control parameters. Also, they often limit a designer in the types of blade geometries, cascade configurations, and flow conditions that can be considered. The Panel Code for Planar Cascades accelerates the design process and gives the designer more freedom in developing blade shapes by offering a simple blade-to-blade flow code. Panel, or integral equation, solution techniques have been used for several years by external aerodynamicists who have developed and refined them into a primary design tool of the aircraft industry. The Panel Code for Planar Cascades adapts these same techniques to provide a versatile, stable, and efficient calculation scheme for internal flow. The code calculates the compressible, inviscid, irrotational flow through a planar cascade of arbitrary blade shapes. Since the panel solution technique is for incompressible flow, a compressibility correction is introduced to account for compressible flow effects. The analysis is limited to flow conditions in the subsonic and shock-free transonic range. Input to the code consists of inlet flow conditions, blade geometry data, and simple control parameters. Output includes flow parameters at selected control points. This program is written in FORTRAN IV for batch execution and has been implemented on an IBM 370 series computer with a central memory requirement of approximately 590K of 8 bit bytes. This program was developed in 1982.