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

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. IECEC Paper No. CT-39 ASME 1995.