Coupled Fluid Structure Simulation Method in the Frequency Domain for Turbomachinery Applications

Turbomachinery components are exposed to unsteady aerodynamic loads which must be considered during the design process to ensure the structural mechanical integrity. There are two primary mechanisms which cause structural vibrations and can lead to high-cycle fatigue due to high dynamic stresses: flutter (self-excited vibrations) and forced response (forced excitation, e.g. wakes from upstream blade rows). In this work an emerging numerical frequency-domain method which is designed to efficiently simulate coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems considering nonlinearities in the flow and structure is modified and applied to an academic and a realistic test case. Furthermore complex structural eigenmodes are considered instead of purely real modes as was demonstrated in the literature so far. This method is able to predict limit cycle oscillations and forced response amplitudes. The coupled solver uses the Harmonic Balance (HB) method with an alternating frequency time approach to model periodically unsteady flows and structure dynamics. The resulting nonlinear HB equations of the flow are solved with a pseudo-time stepping method while the nonlinear HB equations of the structure are solved with a Newton method. The dynamics of the involved structure are further simplified by considering only one relevant eigenmode of the structure. The method is applied to a 3D axial turbine configuration with a modified Young’s modulus for the material of the blisk. The standard flutter curve of the blade row shows that at least one eigenmode is aerodynamically unstable at certain nodal diameters. As a first model test case for the harmonic balance solver, the nonlinear structural damping is defined as a cubic modal damping term. The results of the frequency-domain method are compared to coupled FSI simulations in the time domain. The analysis shows that the frequency-domain method is very promising in terms of both computational efficiency and accuracy.