Investigation of the combined effects of intentional mistuning, damping and coupling on the forced response of bladed disks

Blade-to-blade mistuning is always inevitable in bladed disk assemblies due to imperfections in the manufacturing progress as well as wear during operation. As a result, the forced response of a mistuned bladed disk may be drastically larger than that of the nominal or tuned design. The attendant increase in stress can lead to premature high cycle fatigue (HCF) of the blades. Therefore, it is of great importance to predict and, ultimately, to reduce the blade forced response levels caused by mistuning. In this paper, intentional and random mistuning is introduced into a simplified 12-bladed disk model by varying the stiffness of the blades. The combined effects of intentional mistuning, damping and coupling are examined. The numerical results indicate that there is some threshold value of intentional mistuning and coupling that leads to maximum mistuning effects and certain relations among intentional mistuning strength, integer harmonics, damping and coupling can suppress the response levels of bladed disks with random mistuning, which provides useful guidelines for safe and reliable designs of bladed disk systems.