A Friction-Enhanced Tuned Ring Damper for Bladed Disks

Abstract

This paper introduces a new type of damper for turbomachinery blisks. The major pitfalls of the damper concepts currently employed are two: the low level of relative motion that is available at the damper attachment location, and the inability to control the preload at the frictional interface. To address these issues, the proposed damper is designed as a tuned vibration absorber (TVA), which allows energy transfer from the blades to the damper provided that the natural frequency of the damper is close to that of the host structure. Thanks to the enhanced energy transfer, the damper can experience increased relative motion. Frictional contacts are then included to dissipate the energy transferred to the damper. The damper structure must be stiff enough to withstand centrifugal loading without affecting the preload too much. However, it also must be compliant to make sure that its natural frequencies can match the ones of the host structure. For this reason, the proposed damper involves a complex geometry that is stiff in the radial direction and softer in the circumferential direction, which is the direction of the relative motion. A model of the damper is created to damp the vibration of a realistic blisk. The effectiveness of the damper is investigated using high fidelity finite element (FE) models. The frequency response of the system is obtained to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed design. Preliminary results show the potential of this technology for structures with such low damping.