Design of Band Gap Formation in Periodic Rotors via Optimization

Rotors are usually composed of rotating elements (e.g. disks, impellers, blade stages) which add mass and rotational inertia to the system. When this additional inertia of the rotating elements is evenly distributed along the rotor, inertia periodicity appears and the system presents considerably large band gaps in its frequency response, where no resonances appear. The present work shows that we can change the central frequency of these band gaps, without significantly affecting its bandwidth, by changing the distribution of the inertia along the rotor to a quasi-periodic condition. Such designing of the rotor, and consequently of the band gap, is achieved by an optimization procedure.