Design and Assessment of Forward-Inclined Blades for a 0.5 Hub-to-Tip Ratio Tube-Axial Fan

The paper deals with the design of forward-inclined blades, where “forward inclination” is intended as the design-dependent amount of forward sweep to be incorporated in nonfree-vortex blades to restore quasi-2D flow behaviour within the rotor passages. The aim of the work is to assess the effectiveness of this design modification in a 0.5 hub-to-tip ratio fan with radially stacked blades that induce a roughly constant swirl velocity at the rotor exit. To this end, the original blade has been modified by incorporation of a forward sweep amount that translates into a forward-inclined design, defined in accordance with a method suggested by the authors. Both the original and forward-inclined design were preliminary assessed by CFD and finally verified by experiments. The forward-inclined design demonstrated experimentally to improve the pressure rise and efficiency of the original fan in the whole operation range with ca. 10% gain at design operation.