Experimental Investigation of Friction Damping in Blade Root Joints

The design of disk assemblies requires the capability to predict their dynamic behavior. To achieve this objective, knowledge of friction damping on the contact between blade and disk is of paramount importance. This paper proposes an experimental technique to measure the loss factor and the dynamics, in terms of natural frequencies, of blade-disk attachment. The free decay is used to infer the dynamic parameters from dummy blades. The identification method is based on the Hilbert transform that allows extracting the dynamic parameters from nonlinear system. This paper shows the test rig utilized in the experimental analysis and details the excitation system used to displace the dummy blade. This system must be a real or a “virtual” noncontact system to avoid injecting external damping into the blade under test. Tests were performed on both a dovetail and a fir-tree type attachment. On the dovetail, tests were performed both with dry contact surfaces and with contact surfaces covered by a film of lubricant to achieve a low coefficient of friction. This low coefficient of friction better simulates dry surfaces at high temperatures, as friction coefficients decrease with temperatures. This paper presents the results obtained on the first and second bending mode. The experimental results show the loss factor and the natural frequency for different axial loads. The measured loss factor depends on the amplitude of vibrations. As predicted with theoretical analyses the loss factor shows a maximum then approaching zero for large amplitude of vibrations. As a rule, it decreases with increasing centrifugal loads.