On the Interaction of Multiple Traveling Wave Modes in the Flutter Vibrations of Friction-Damped Tuned Bladed Disks

It is well-known that flutter vibrations of bladed disks can be saturated by dry friction. Previous theoretical investigations indicated that the steady-state, friction-damped flutter vibrations of tuned bladed disks are always dominated by a single traveling wave component, even if multiple traveling wave forms are unstable. This contrasts recent experimental investigations where multiple traveling wave forms were found to participate at steady state. In this paper, we demonstrate that this phenomenon can be explained by nonlinear frictional interblade coupling. To this end, we consider a simple phenomenological model of a bladed disk with frictional intersector coupling and two unstable traveling waves forms. Vibrations occur not only in the form of limit cycle oscillations (periodic) but also in the form of limit torus oscillations (quasi-periodic). It is shown how the limit state depends on the initial conditions, and that the occurrence of multiwave flutter depends on the proximity of the complex eigenvalues of the associated unstable waves. Finally, by computing the limit torus oscillation with a frequency-domain method, we lay the cornerstone for the systematic prediction of friction-saturated flutter vibrations of state-of-the-art bladed disk models.