Numerical and Experimental Damping Assessment of a Thin-Walled Friction Damper in the Rotating Setup With High Pressure Turbine Blades

Underplatform friction dampers are possible solutions for minimizing vibrations of rotating turbine blades. Solid dampers, characterized by their compact dimensions, are frequently used in real applications and often appear in patents in different forms. A different type of the friction damper is a thin-walled structure, which has larger dimensions and smaller contact stresses on a wider contact area in relation to the solid damper. The damping performance of a thin-walled damper, mounted under the platforms of two rotating, freestanding high pressure turbine blades, is investigated numerically and experimentally in this paper. The tangential and normal contact stiffness that are crucial parameters in optimal design of any friction damper are determined from three-dimensional finite element computations of the contact behavior of the damper on the platform including friction and centrifugal effects. The computed contact stiffness values are applied to nonlinear dynamic simulations of the analyzed blades coupled by the friction damper of a specified mass. These numerical analyses are performed in the modal frequency domain, which is based on the harmonic balance method for the complex linearization of friction forces. The numerical dynamic results are in good agreement with the measured data of the real mistuned system. In the analyzed excitation range, the numerical performance curve of the thin-walled damper is obtained within the scatter band of the experimental results. For the known friction coefficients and available finite element and harmonic balance tools, the described numerical process confirms its usability in the design process of turbine blades with underplatform dampers.