Analysis of Mistuned Blade Vibrations Based on Normally Distributed Blade Individual Natural Frequencies

Abstract

With increasing demands for reliability of modern turbomachinery blades the quantification of uncertainty and its impact on the designed product has become an important part of the development process. This paper aims to contribute to an improved approximation of expected vibration amplitudes of a mistuned rotor assembly under certain assumptions on the probability distribution of the blade’s natural frequencies. A previously widely used lumped mass model is employed to represent the vibrational behavior of a cyclic symmetric structure. Aerodynamic coupling of the blades is considered based on the concept of influence coefficients leading to individual damping of the traveling wave modes. The natural frequencies of individual rotor blades are assumed to be normal distributed and the required variance could be estimated due to experiences with the applied manufacturing process. Under these conditions it is possible to derive the probability distribution of the off-diagonal terms in the mistuned equations of motions, that are responsible for the coupling of different circumferential modes. Knowing these distributions recent limits on the maximum attainable mistuned vibration amplitude are improved. The improvement is achieved due to the fact, that the maximum amplification depends on the mistuning strength. This improved limit can be used in the development process, as it could partly replace probabilistic studies with surrogate models of reduced order. The obtained results are verified with numerical simulations of the underlying structural model with random mistuning patterns based on a normal distribution of individual blade frequencies.