Stochastic Modeling of Geometric Mistuning and Application to Fleet Response Prediction

An improved spatial statistical approach and probabilistic prediction method for mistuned integrally bladed rotors is proposed and validated with a large population of rotors. Prior work utilized blade-alone principal component analysis to model spatial variation arising from geometric deviations contributing to forced response mistuning amplification. Often, these studies considered a single rotor measured by contact probe coordinate measurement machines to assess the predictive capabilities of spatial statistics through principal component analysis. The validity of the approach has not yet been demonstrated on a large population of mistuned rotors representative of operating fleets, a shortcoming addressed in this work. Furthermore, this work improves the existing predictions by applying principal component methods to sets of airfoil (rotor) measurements, thus effectively capturing blade-to-blade spatial correlations. In conjunction with bootstrap sampling, the method is validated with a set of 40 rotors and quantifies the subset size needed to characterize the population. The work combines a novel statistical representation of rotor geometric mistuning with that of probabilistic techniques to predict the known distribution of forced response amplitudes