Turbomachinery Aeromechanics

Modern turbomachinery design is characterized by a tendency towards thinner, lighter and highly loaded components which leads to improved efficiency, but also increased risk for vibrations. Aeromechanical blade vibrations present a significant challenge in a new design as well as in operation, and avoiding this constitutes a large part of the blade design work. Understanding and mastering destructive blade vibration enables engine designs with improved efficiencies and lighter components, which emphasis importance of research in turbomachinery aeromechanics.

Research in this field has been carried at the Division of Heat and Power Technology since 25 years back and has thereby an extensive international profile and experience (both on a national and international level). The division has participated as active member and task leader in various EU projects on gas turbine unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity, like ADTurB 1 and 2, DAIGTS and as the project coordinator of the EU FP7 funded project FUTURE on turbomachinery flutter. The group currently coordinating a large EU H2020 project ARIAS (Advanced Research into Aeromechanical Solutions) , where 19 partners from 7 different European countries, joined their forces with aim to improve the predictive capability of methods used to analyze aerodynamically induced blade vibrations in aircraft engines.

The current research conducted by the group in this field is both of experimental and numerical character, utilizing unique test facilities and in-house developed multi-disciplinary synthesis tool for aeromechanical chain analysis (AROMA tool). Some of the topics covered in current aeromechanical research projects at the division are: aerodynamic damping in transonic compressors vibrating at high-reduced frequencies (ARIAS H2020 project), aerodynamic damping in separated flow (ADiSS NFFP7 project), aeroelastic tailoring of the blades and intentional mistuning of blisks (VIND NFFP7 project).