Numerical modelling and analysis of friction contact for turbine blades

High cycle fatigue failure of turbine and compressor blades due to resonance in the operating frequency range is one of the main problems in the design of gas turbine engines. To suppress excessive vibrations in the blades and prevent high cycle fatigue, dry friction dampers are used by the engine manufacturers. However, due to the nonlinear nature of friction contact, analysis of such systems becomes complicated. This work focuses on the numerical modelling of friction contact and a 3D friction contact model is developed. To reduce the computation time in the Newton-iteration steps, a method to compute the Jacobian matrix in parallel to the contact forces is proposed. The developed numerical scheme is successfully applied on turbine blades with shroud contact having an arbitrary 3D relative displacement. The equations of motion are formulated in the frequency domain using the multiharmonic balance method to accurately capture the nonlinear contact forces and displacements. Moreover, the equations of motion of the full turbine blade model are reduced to a single sector model by exploiting the concept of the cyclic symmetry boundary condition for a periodic structure. The developed 3D coupled numerical contact model is compared with a 3D contact model having uncoupled tangential motion and drawback of the uncoupled contact model is discussed. Furthermore, presence of higher harmonics in the nonlinear contact forces is analyzed and their effect on the excitation of the different harmonic indices (nodal diameters) of the bladed disk are systematically presented. Moreover, due to the quasi-analytical computation of the Jacobian matrix, the developed scheme is proved to be effective in solving the equations of motion and significant reduction in time is achieved without loss of accuracy.