Conjectural Bifurcation Analysis of an Aircraft Engine Blade Undergoing 3D Unilateral Contact Constraints

Prediction of rotor/stator interaction phenomena between a blade-tip and the surrounding abradable coating deposited on the casing has seen recent promising numerical developments that revealed consistency with several experimental set-up. In particular, the location of critical rotational frequencies, damaged blade areas as well as the wear pattern along the casing circumference were accurately predicted for an interaction scenario involving a low-pressure compressor blade and the surrounding abradable coating deposited on a perfectly rigid casing. The structural behaviour of the blade in the vicinity of a critical rotational frequency however remains unclear as brutal amplitude variations observed experimentally could not be numerically captured without assuming contact loss or an improbable drastic and sudden change of the abradable coating mechanical properties during the interaction. In this paper, attention is paid to the structural behaviour of a high-pressure compressor blade at the neighbourhood of a critical rotational frequency. The interaction scenarios for two close rotational frequencies: Ω_c and $Ωc*$ are analyzed using empirical mode decomposition based on an adjusted B-spline interpolation of the time responses. The obtained results are compared to the interaction scenario dictated by the abradable coating removal history and the location of contact areas. The unstable nature of the blade vibratory response when the rotational frequency exceeds a critical rotational frequency is underlined and a plausible scenario arises for explaining a sudden and significant decrease of the blade amplitude of vibration without contact separation.