Stability Analysis of an Industrial Blade Accounting for a Blade-Tip/Casing Nonlinear Interface

Abstract

This paper investigates the local stability analysis of periodic solutions corresponding to the nonlinear vibration response of an industrial compressor blade, NASA rotor 37, on which are applied different types of nonlinearities. These solutions are obtained using a harmonic balance method-based approach presented in a previous paper. It accounts for unilateral contact and dry friction of the rotating blade against a rigid casing through a regularized penalty law. A Lanczos filtering technique is also employed to mitigate spurious oscillations related to the Gibbs phenomenon thus enhancing the robustness of the solver. In addition, a component mode synthesis technique is used to reduce the dimension of the numerical model. Stability assessment of the computed solutions relies on Floquet theory. It is performed through the computation of the monodromy matrix as well as Hill's method. Both methodologies are applied and thoroughly compared as the severity of the nonlinearity is gradually increased from a cubic spring to 3D contact conditions on a deformed casing. While the presented results underline the applicability of both stability assessment methodologies for all types of nonlinearities, they also put forward the much higher computational effort required when computing the monodromy matrix. Indeed, it is shown that Hill's method yields converged results for significantly lower values of both the number of retained harmonics and number of time steps thus making it a more efficient method when dealing with industrial models. Finally, the presented results are in excellent agreement with a time domain-based reference solution strategy.