International audienceThe safety of turbomachines requires controlling the risks caused by contacts occurring between fixed and rotating parts. Undesirable phenomena induced by bladed wheel/casing interactions are caused by the forced excitation of the natural modes of a blade leading to its damage or by potentially dangerous couplings between the modes of the casing and those of the wheel. Rotor-stator contacts may also lead to various types of dangerous behavior, including the well known configurations of dry whirl and dry whip. The paper proposes a large-scale literature review and examines existing numerical models and experimental setups used for highlighting the phenomenology involved in different rotor to stator contacts configurations. It confirms the great complexity of the problems which, by nature, are considerably nonlinear and involve multiphysics and multiscale coupled behaviors

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In turbomachinery, one way to improve aerodynamic performance and reduce fuel consumption consists of minimizing the clearance between rotor and casing. Yet the probability of contact is increased and this may lead in some specific conditions to a large and even unstable excitation on the impeller and stator. To achieve better understanding of the dynamic behavior occurring during the blade-to-casing contact, many numerical studies have been conducted but only a few experiments have been reported in the literature thus far. The interaction experiment reported in this paper involves a low-pressure, rotating centrifugal compressor and its casing tested in a vacuum chamber. Contact is initiated by introducing a gap near zero, and certain events with significant dynamic levels are observed during the run-up. Measurements are performed using strain gauges on both the rotating and stationary parts and a Scanning Laser Doppler Vibrometer on the stator. This research focuses on an analysis of the recorded data. Time series data are also analyzed by means of standard signal processing and a full spectrum analysis in order to identify the direction of traveling wave propagation on the two structures as well as nodal diameters and frequencies. The dynamic response of structures is accompanied by variations in other physical parameters such as temperature, static deformed shapes, speed and torque. A wearing pattern is evaluated following the contact experiments. The spectral content of response is dominated by frequency modes excited by engine orders as well as by sidebands due to inherent system non-linearity.

In turbomachinery, it is well known that tighter operating clearances improve the efficiency. However, this leads to unwanted potential unilateral and frictional contact occurrences between the rotating (blades) and stationary components (casings) together with attendant thermal excitations. Unilateral contact induces discontinuities in the velocity at impact times, hence the terminology nonsmooth dynamics. Current modeling strategies of rotor-stator interactions are either based on regularizing penalty methods or on explicit time-marching methods derived from Carpenter's forward Lagrange multiplier method. Regularization introduces an artificial time scale in the formulation corresponding to numerical stiffness which is not desirable. Carpenter's scheme has been successfully applied to turbomachinery industrial models in the sole mechanical framework, but faces serious stability issues when dealing with the additional heat equation.This work overcomes the above issues by using the MoreauJean nonsmooth integration scheme within an implicit Â-method. This numerical scheme is based on a mathematically sound description of the contact dynamics by means of measure differential inclusions and enjoys attractive features. The procedure is unconditionally stable opening doors to quick preliminary simulations with time-steps one hundred times larger than with previous algorithms. It can also deal with strongly coupled thermomechanical problems.

In order to increase the aerodynamic performances of their engines, aircraft engine manufacturers try to minimize the clearance between rotating and stationary parts in axial and centrifugal compressors. Consequently, the probability of contact increases, leading to undesirable phenomena caused by forced excitation of the natural modes or by modal interaction. Due to the complexity of these phenomena, many numerical studies have been conducted to gain a better understanding of the physics associated with them, looking primarily at their respective influence on potential unstable behaviors. However, the influence of other physical phenomena, such as friction and wear, remains poorly understood. The aim of this work is to show some effects associated with friction and wear on the dynamic behavior resulting from blade-to-casing interaction. The numerical study reported here is based on a simplified finite element model of a rotating bladed disk and a flexible casing. The contact algorithm uses an explicit time marching scheme with the Lagrange multipliers method. Friction and wear are formulated using, respectively, Coulomb's and Archard's laws. The rotational speed is set to critical speed giving rise to modal interaction between a backward mode of the casing and a counter-rotating mode of the bladed disk with one nodal diameter (ND). Contact is initiated by a dynamic excitation of the stator. In the presence of friction, the system becomes unstable when a sideband of the excitation frequency coincides with 1ND mode of the bladed disk. The introduction of wear leads to a vibration reduction, while the abradable material is removed by the wear process. The number of wear lobes produced on the casing is related to the ratio between the vibration frequency of the blades and the rotating speed. The ratio obtained by means of the FE model corroborates experimental observations.