A direct experimental–numerical method for investigations of a laboratory under-platform damper behavior

Under-platform dampers are commonly adopted in order to mitigate resonant vibration of turbine blades. The need for reliable models for the design of under-platform dampers has led to a considerable amount of technical literature on under-platform damper modeling in the last three decades. Although much effort has been devoted to the under-platform damper modeling in order to avail of a predictive tool for new damper designs, experimental validation of the modeling is still necessary. This is due to the complexity caused by the interaction of the contacts at the two damper-platform interfaces with the additional complication of the variablity of physical contact parameters (in particularly friction) and their nonlinearity. The traditional experimental configuration for evaluating under-platform damper behavior is measuring the blade tip response by incorporating the damper between two adjacent blades (representing a cyclic segment of the bladed disk) under controlled excitation. The effectiveness of the damper is revealed by the difference in blade tip response depending on whether the damper is applied or not. With this approach one cannot investigate the damper behavior directly and no measurements of the contact parameters can be undertake. Consequently, tentative values for the contact parameters are assigned from previous experience and then case-by-case finely tuned until the numerical predictions are consistent with the experimental evidence. In this method the physical determination of the contact parameters is obtained using test rigs designed to produce single contact tests which simulate the local damper-platfom contact geometry. However, the significant limitation of single contact test results is that they do not reveal the dependence of contact parameters on the real damper contact conditions. The method proposed in this paper overcomes this problem. In this new approach a purposely developed test rig allows the in-plane forces transferred through the damper between the two simulated platforms to be measured, while at the same time monitoring in-plane relative displacements of the platforms. The in-plane damper kinematics are reconstructed from the experimental data using the contact constraints and two damper motion measurements, one translational and one rotational. The measurement procedures provide reliable results, which allow very fine details of contact kinematics to be revealed. It is demonstrated that the highly satisfactory performance of the test rig and the related procedures allows fine tuning of the contact parameters (local friction coefficients and contact stiffness), which can be safely fed into a direct time integration numerical model. The numerical model is, in turn, cross-checked against the experimental results, and then used to acquire deeper understanding of the damper behavior (e.g. contact state, slipping and sticking displacement at all contact points), giving an insight into those features which the measurements alone are not capable of producing. The numerical model of the system is based on one key assumption: the contact model does not take into account the microslip effect that exists in the experiments. Although there is room for improvement of both experimental configuration and numerical modeling, which future work will consider, the results obtained with this approach demonstrate that the optimization of dampers can be less a matter of trial and error development and more a matter of knowledge of damper dynamics