In order to deal with the current economical and environmental context, the next engine generation will need to offer great operability, compactness and high efficiency. In aircraft engines, the compressor remains one of the critical components, and its design is still a challenging task. At low massflow rate, their operability is bounded by the surge limit, surge being a highly unstable and dangerous phenomenon. Today, few experimental studies on compressor surge are available because of the inherent threat to the facility. In that context, numerical simulation can bring about information on the onset of aerodynamic instabilities and help to predict the surge limit. The work presented in this PhD thesis aims at setting up a method to perform the numerical simulation of surge inception and of an entire cycle of the instability with the CFD code elsA. The chosen test case is the axial multistage research compressor CREATE designed and built by Snecma, and experimentally studied at LMFA. Previous studies have pointed out the role of the volumes adjacent to the compressor ; the originality of this work is thus the inclusion of the volumes of the test-rig in the simulation of the compressor. One of the difficulties inherent to the simulation of those instabilities is their characteristic time of at least one hundred revolutions of the machine. Hence the computation has required a massively parallel approach and about one million CPU hours. Finally, given that the flow reverses during a surge cycle, the boundary conditions have been modified to be able to cope with the flow inversions. The simulation was able to capture surge inception and the entire cycle of the instability. The comparison with the experimental data showed that the main patterns of the cycle are correctly predicted (precursor phenomena of surge, duration of the cycle...). In the meantime, an acoustic study has been performed in order to isolate the eigenmodes of the test-rig. The analysis of the results pointed out the role of acoustic phenomena in surge inception. The different phases of the cycle are then studied and characterized (surge inception, reversed-flow phase, recovery and repressurization). This work has incremented a database that allows a better understanding of the instabilities that develop in this kind of machine. From now on, those results may help to elaborate and validate cheaper models of the surge phenomenon to be used in the design process.
