Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TURBOMACHINERY TURBINE BLADE VIBRA TORY STRESS PREDICTION

The objective of this thesis was to develop a methodology to predict the vibratory stresses of a turbomachinery turbine blade. The aerodynamic excitation phenomenon was not studied in this research. Furthermore, the turbine blades studied in this research had the characteristics of being unshrouded, uncooled and used mainly in small to medium sized turbomachineries. This thesis consists of four main subjects. The first subject, composed of an analysis of experimental results, was done to ex tract damping values of the turbine blades as well as resonances. The damping values extracted from the experimental data were used to determine analytical vibratory stresses with FLARES. Furthermore, the resonances were identified during the data reduction and therefore, the experimental vibratory stresses were extracted. These values were later used to correlate the analytical vibratory stresses predicted using FLARES. The second subject elaborated on an analytical method with finite element analysis using contact elements to determine natural frequencies and mode shapes of the turbine blades