Effects of the Disk Flexibility on the Flutter and Aeroelastic Response of Mistuned Bladed Disks

In the present study, the flutter and aeroelastic response of mistuned bladed disks to the engine order excitation are studied with the aim of determining the effects of disk structural properties and also establishing an efficient method of analysis. For modeling the solid-fluid interaction, the Whitehead’s incompressible, two dimensional cascade theory is used. The structure is also modeled, using a 4 degrees of freedom lumped mass-spring system, which accounts for the bending and torsional deformation of the blade and the disk. This model would enable us to study the effect of structural coupling of adjacent sections as well as the disk flexibility. The solution is based on expansion of the mistuned-blade response in terms of the traveling-wave modes of a tuned bladed disk. The adopted method would be appropriate for determining the aeroelastic response, since the aerodynamic loads are available only for each individual traveling-wave mode. The obtained solution is used to study the effects of disk flexibility on the aeroelastic instability, variations of natural frequencies with different numbers of nodal diameters, and the sensitivity of the vibration amplitude response to the mistuning. Furthermore, the effects of mistuning in blades torsional frequencies and the mistuning in engine order excitation is considered. Parametric studies show that for disks with a lower bending stiffness, the mistuning can significantly influence the aeroelastic behavior such that the for a certain amount of the natural frequency, the disk response could be increased more than 8 times due to the presence of mistuning.