Flutter of Fan Blades in the Aircraft Engine in the Three-Dimensional Subsonic Gas Flow

Aeroelasticity problems arise in the different fields of technology. The accident-free operation of the airborne machines is one of the most important factors that should be taken into account during their designing and upgrading. The solution of this problem involves the implementation of many measures to provide the system reliability on the whole, including its individual elements, in particular aircraft engine, its fan whose wide-chord blades can be exposed to the wreckage due to different reasons including the aeroelastic effects, i.e. self-excited vibrations. As a result, the origination of the aeroelastic phenomenon (flutter) in design and off-design modes should be eliminated at the stage of the design and operational development of the rotor wheel that would result in a considerable increase of the level of reliability of the aircraft engine. Based on the analysis of the available methods used for the flutter prediction we can draw a conclusion that the most promising approach to the analysis of the aeroelastic behavior of the blade ring of fan is the use of the method based on the three-dimensional model of the aerodynamics and dynamics (the method used for the solution of the coupled aeroelastic problem). By solving the coupled aeroelastic problem of the nonstationary aerodynamics and elastic vibrations of the blades we can get the amplitude –frequency blade vibration spectrum for the three-dimensional gas flow, including forced vibrations and self-excided vibrations in order to increase the reliability of the blade row of turbine machines. The developed numerical method was used for the analysis of the aeroelastic behavior of the blade ring of the fan mounted in the airborne engine for the operation mode of 3520 rmp with appropriate boundary conditions at the inlet and outlet behind the ring. The computation data confirmed the origination of self-vibrations for the given fan operation mode.