Evaluation of Acoustic Flutter Suppression for Cascade in Transonic Flow

Abstract

Flutter suppression via actively excited acoustic waves is a new idea proposed recently. The high flutter frequency (typically 50–500 Hz for a fan blade) and stringent space constraint make conventional mechanical type flutter suppression devices difficult to implement for turbomachines. Acoustic means arises as a new alternative which avoids the difficulties associated with the mechanical methods. The objective of this work is to evaluate numerically the transonic flutter suppression concept based on the application of sound waves to two-dimensional cascade configuration. This is performed using a high-resolution Euler code based on a dynamic mesh system. The concept has been tested to determine the effectiveness and limitations of this acoustic method. In a generic bending-torsion flutter study, trailing edge is found to be the optimal forcing location and the control gain phase is crucial for an effective suppression. The P&W fan rig cascade was used as the model to evaluate the acoustic flutter suppression technique. With an appropriate selection of the control logic the flutter margin can be enlarged. Analogous to what were concluded in the isolated airfoil study, for internal excitation, trailing-edge forcing was shown to be optimal since the trailing-edge receptivity still works as the dominant mechanism for generating the acoustically induced airloads.