The Relevance of Damper Pre-Optimization and its Effectiveness on the Forced Response of Blades

The paper presents a calculation procedure for the design of turbine blades with underplatform dampers. The procedure involves damper “pre-optimization” before the coupled calculation with the blades. The pre-optimization procedure excludes, since the early design stage, all those damper configurations leading to low damping performance. Pre-optimization involves plotting a design “damper map” with forbidden areas, corresponding to poorly performing damper geometries and admissible design areas, where effective solutions for the damper shape can be explored. Once the candidate damper configurations have been selected, the damper equilibrium equations are solved by using both the multi-harmonic balance (MHB) method, and the direct time integration method (DTI). Direct time integration of the damper dynamic equations is implemented in order to compute the trend of the contact forces in time and the shape of the hysteresis cycles at the different contact points. Based on these trends, the correct number of Fourier terms to represent the contact forces on the damper is chosen. It is shown that one harmonic term together with the static term, are enough in the MHB calculation of a pre-optimized damper. The proposed method is applied to a test case of a damper coupled with two blades. Experimental forced response functions of the test case with a nominal damper are available for comparison. The purpose of this paper is to show the effectiveness of the “damper maps” in excluding all those damper configurations, leading to undesirable damper behavior and to highlight the strong influence of the blades mode of vibration on the damper effectiveness. From the comparison of dampers with different geometrical parameters, the pre-optimized damper proved to be not only the most effective, in terms of damping capability, but also the one that leads to a faster and more flexible calculation of the damper, coupled with the blades.