This paper revisits the Space-Time Gradient (STG) method which was developed for efficient analysis of unsteady flows due to rotor–stator interaction and presents the method from an alternative time-clocking perspective. The STG method requires reordering of blade passages according to their relative clocking positions with respect to blades of an adjacent blade row. As the space-clocking is linked to an equivalent time-clocking, the passage reordering can be performed according to the alternative time-clocking. With the time-clocking perspective, unsteady flow solutions from different passages of the same blade row are mapped to flow solutions of the same passage at different time instants or phase angles. Accordingly, the time derivative of the unsteady flow equation is discretized in time directly, which is more natural than transforming the time derivative to a spatial one as with the original STG method. To improve the solution accuracy, a ninth order difference scheme has been investigated for discretizing the time derivative. To achieve a stable solution for the high order scheme, the implicit solution method of Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel/Gauss-Seidel (LU-SGS/GS) has been employed. The NASA Stage 35 and its blade-count-reduced variant are used to demonstrate the validity of the time-clocking based passage reordering and the advantages of the high order difference scheme for the STG method. Results from an existing harmonic balance flow solver are also provided to contrast the two methods in terms of solution stability and computational cost.

A Reduced Order Model (ROM) based analysis method for turbomachinery cascade coupled mode flutter is presented in this paper. The unsteady aerodynamic model is established by a system identification technique combined with a set of Aerodynamic Influence Coefficients (AIC). Subsequently, the aerodynamic model is encoded into the state space and then coupled with the structural dynamic equations, resulting in a ROM of the cascade aeroelasticity. The cascade flutter can be determined by solving the eigenvalues of the ROM. Bending-torsional coupled mode flutter analysis for the Standard Configuration Eleven (SC11) cascade is used to validate the proposed method.