Compressor Blade Boundary Layers: Part 1—Test Facility and Measurements With No Incident Wakes

The boundary layers on compressor blades are sensitive to the conditions at which transition occurs and transition can be affected by the convection of wakes from upstream blade rows. This paper and its companion, Part 2 by the same authors, describes an experiment to study the effect of the moving wakes on the boundary layer of a compressor blade. This paper describes the background and facility devised to introduce wakes together with results obtained on the blades in tests without the wakes present. Part 2 describes the measurements made with the wakes present and presents conclusions for the whole project. Further details of all aspects of the work can be found in Dong (1988).