Best practices for underplatform damper designers

The purpose of this paper is to offer a practical demonstration of how essential preoptimization is in the design of underplatform dampers for turbine blades. Preoptimization can be thought of as a “prescreening” which allows excluding, since the early design stages, a high number of poorly performing damper–platform configurations. This concept, previously presented by the authors, is here extended and its generality for all blade bending modes is rigorously demonstrated. The paper addresses a test case where the introduction of curved-flat underplatform dampers is necessary to avoid a dangerous resonance crossing in the operating rotational speed range of a real turbine disk. It is shown how preoptimized dampers are the only ones that manage to satisfy all functional requirements, including those in the nonlinear operating regime. The same set of dampers may have been identified by exploring, through hundreds of computationally intensive nonlinear calculations, the performance of all possible damper configurations. The latter approach, i.e. iterative design, is unpractical and has to be repeated for each new set of blades since it is based on a test case-specific trial-and-error procedure. Preoptimization substitutes iterations with knowledge of the damper behavior and can therefore be considered as “informed design”: viable damper configurations are instantly singled out through simple but insightful considerations on the damper equilibrium of forces and moments.