Experimental and Numerical Investigations of Friction Rings Damping of Blisks

The use of friction ring dampers for integrally bladed disks (blisks) is investigated numerically and experimentally in this paper. A test rig was developed and consists in an industrial HP compressor blisk rotating inside a vacuum chamber. Excitation is produced through piezoelectric actuators and measured data are obtained from strain gauges. Non-linear resonance curves obtained by stepped sine tests are studied. Interesting phenomena on the behaviour of this damping technology are obtained experimentally. Parametric studies on the influence of the rotation speed or of the excitation level are also presented. A non-linear modal identification method is used in order to extract the modal parameters from the resonance curves. Then a comparison of these experimental results to the results of numerical simulations is proposed. The numerical methods is based on a frequency domain formulation of the system’s dynamics; a non-linear modal approach is used. The correlation between the experiments and the predicted results are in quite good agreement given the complexity and the variability of the system and phenomena.