An Experimental Investigation of the Dynamics of a Blade with Two Under-Platform Dampers

Several experimental apparatus have been designed in the past to evaluate the effectiveness of under-platform dampers. Most of these experimental setups allow to measure the overall damper efficiency in terms of reduction of vibration amplitude in turbine blades. The experimental data collected with these test rigs do not increase the knowledge about the damper dynamics and therefore the uncertainty on the damper behavior remains a big issue. In this paper a different approach to evaluate the damper-blade interaction has been put forward. A test rig has been purposely designed to accommodate a single blade and two under-platform dampers. One side of each damper is in contact with a ground support specifically designed to measure two independent forces on the damper. In this way both the normal and the tangential force components in the damper-blade contact can be inferred. Damper kinematics is rebuilt by using the relative displacement measured between damper and blade. This paper describes the concept behind the new approach, shows the details of the new test rig and discuss the blade frequency response from a new point of view.