Development of a Multi-Shaker-Control to Investigate the Influence of the Interblade Phase Angle on Frictionally Damped Turbine Blades

Constructive damper concepts are developed and integrated in turbomachinery to reduce vibration amplitudes generated by dynamic loads. The potential damping effectiveness of friction-based damper concepts is strongly dependent on the relative motion between adjacent blades, besides other factors such as normal force. In cyclic symmetric structures the phase difference is determined by the excited nodal diameter, which leads to different damper movements and efficiencies for given mode shapes. Several studies on the investigation of the damper performance of different underplatform damper geometries have been carried out on non-rotating test stands consisting usually of two blades in order to reduce the experimental effort before setting up rotational tests. Based on the existing modes of the two blades and the application of commonly just one shaker, the investigations are limited to the in-phase and out-of-phase modes. In this paper an experimental approach is developed to reduce the gap of transferability between non-rotating and rotational tests to analyze the effects of a variable interblade phase angle on the damping effect of underplatform dampers. For this purpose, a cascaded control system using two shakers is being developed to control the force amplitudes and the phase difference between the response of the two blades. The control algorithm is designed in a model-based way by using a two degrees of freedom oscillator with friction contact and is subsequently integrated in the non-rotating test stand.