AN ANALYTICAL STUDY ON THE EFFECT OF NON-UNIFORM VANE SPACING ON FORCED RESPONSE REDUCTION IN A MISTUNED BLISK ROTOR IN A MULTISTAGE AXIAL COMPRESSOR

Stators with non-uniform vane spacing (NUVS) have been sought as an effective way to reduce the rotor forced response at certain resonance crossing of concern. A comprehensive experimental study has been conducted in Purdue 3-stage axial research compressor to evaluate the effectiveness of NUVS stator on reducing the forced response of the downstream rotor using strain gage measurement. The experimental results showed that the classical estimation method failed to predict the reduction factor correctly, mainly due to the lack of consideration for the damping and mistuning effects. To better understand the experimental results, and to provide an efficient and more accurate analysis tool for the rotor forced response under NUVS stator excitation, a detailed analytical study was conducted in this paper. The blade forced response was solved using an efficient, steady-state linearized approach. A single blade analysis was done first to study the effect of damping. The case studies show that higher damping causes more overlap of the blade forced response from adjacent engine order (EO) excitations and, thus, increases the total normalized blade response under NUVS stator excitation. A mistuned blisk aeroelastic model was introduced next, with the mistuning effect modelled using Fundamental Mistuning Model (FMM). Both structural coupling and aerodynamic coupling effects can be included in the aeroelastic model. Similar to the experimental results, the mistuned blisk case study shows a large blade-to-blade variation in the blade forced response under both symmetric and asymmetric NUVS stator excitation, even at a low, non-intentional mistuning level. A statistical study with 100 randomly generated mistuned blisks shows that the forced response reduction effect of a specific NUVS design could vary significantly with a small change of the mistuning pattern, which suggests that mistuning has to be carefully considered in the design, evaluation, and optimization of a NUVS stator.