5. Conclusion
Highly loaded transonic rotors with sweep are designed by translating the stacking axis of NASA Rotor 37 in chordwise direction, and the swept rotors are studied by numerical simulation in this paper. The results show both the peak efficiency and total pressure ratio have increased for forward swept rotor SF in comparison with unswept rotor Baseline at peak efficiency point, and its stall margin has improved over 10% as well. By contrast, the overall performance of has decreased for aft swept rotor SA. Meanwhile, the choking massflow of swept rotors changes clearly as a result of the spatial change of aerodynamic throat, and the forward sweep produces a larger area of aerodynamic throat and choking mass flow for blade. The aerodynamic sweep has different influence on different span of rotor. Therefore, both forward sweep and aft sweep benefit to flow characteristic improvement in a certain span of swept rotors, which affects new radial and streamwise loading distributions in swept rotors. The additional radial pressure gradient produced by forward sweep attenuates the accumulation of low-energy fluids, which weakens the passage shock in tip region and pushes the shock front far away from leading edge of blade. Meanwhile, the strength of leakage flow is also suppressed because of the decreased loading near leading edge in tip region of the forward swept rotor. Therefore, the aerodynamic losses and flow blockage in tip region has decreased obviously in the forward swept rotor SF and its stall margin is also improved.