New Modeling Combining Kinematic and Stiffness Nonlinearity in Under Platform Dampers

Turbine blades are used under increasingly severe conditions in order to increase the thermal efficiency of the gas turbines in operation. Friction dampers are often used to reduce the vibration of the blade and improve the plant reliability. Under platform dampers designed to generate friction between platforms and dampers have been widely adopted in gas turbines as one of the friction dampers. It is important to predict the vibration characteristics of such damper blades analytically during the design phase, and many analysis methods have been proposed vigorously. However, the phenomenon of the friction damper is not fully understood because of its complicated behavior due to nonlinearity such as contact and sliding. One of them is the variability of frequency generated in the under platform dampers. Recently, it has been reported on the variability of frequency in the mock-up blade test greatly under small excitation force, due to variability of contact surfaces. As different approach, mechanism of the variability of frequency is explained even if each damper pin has the same dimensions and characteristics of stiffness each other under the range of small vibration without slipped phenomena. In this paper, the phenomenon of this frequency variation is shown based on two physical phenomena. First, it shows the geometric nonlinear characteristics in which the normal load changes by the friction coefficient of the pin and the pin angle. Second, it shows the stiffness nonlinear characteristics in which the contact stiffness changes with the normal load of the pin. Based on the new proposed modeling of combining the geometric nonlinear characteristics and nonlinear stiffness characteristics, the phenomenon is shown in which the relative displacement of the pin changes the load and contact stiffness, and the frequency changes. It also shows that the maximum normal load before sliding is different depending on the friction coefficient and the pin angle, and that when the friction coefficient is large and the damper angle is large, the change in contact stiffness due to the normal load is large and the variability of frequency is large.