Numerical and Experimental Investigation of an Underplatform Damper Test Rig

Abstract

During operation mechanical structures can experience large vibration amplitudes. One of the challenges encountered in gas-turbine blade design is avoiding high-cycle fatigue failure usually caused by large resonance stresses driven by aeroelastic excitation. A common approach to control the amplitude levels relies on increasing friction damping by incorporating underplatform dampers (UPD). An accurate prediction of the dynamics of a blade-damper system is quite challenging, due to the highly nonlinear nature of the friction interfaces and detailed validation is required to ensure that a good modelling approach is selected. To support the validation process, a newly developed experimental damper rig will be presented, based on a set of newly introduced non-dimensional parameters that ensure a similar dynamic behaviour of the test rig to a real turbine blade-damper system. An ini- tial experimental investigation highlighted the sensitivity of the measured response with regards to settling and running in of the damper, and further measurements identified a strong dependence of the nonlinear behaviour to localised damper motion. Numerical simulations of the damper rig with a simple macroslip damper model were performed during the preliminary design, and a comparison to the measured data highlighted the ability of the basic implicit model to capture the resonance frequencies of the system accuratelyю