Fatigue damage prevention on turbine blades: study of underplatform damper shape

Forced vibrations can lead to an irreparable damage of a blade array. Devices called “underplatform damper” that dissipate the vibration energy are employed in order to reduce blade vibration amplitude. The present paper deals with the design of the underplatform damper. A numerical code to calculate the forced response of a blade array with dampers has been previously purposely developed. A method is here proposed for the estimation of the unknown contact parameters demanded by the code. The computation results are here validated by means of comparison with experimental results on a static test rig. Three dampers with different shape are tested.