Dynamic Response of a Simplified Turbine Blade Model with Under-Platform Dry Friction Dampers Considering Normal Load Variation

Dry friction dampers are widely used to reduce vibration. The forced vibration response of a simplified turbine blade with a new kind of under-platform dry friction dampers is studied in this paper. The model consists of a clamped blade as two rigidly connected beams and two dampers in the form of masses which are allowed to slide along the blade platform in the horizontal direction and vibrate with the blade platform in the vertical direction. The horizontal and vertical vibrations of the two dampers, and the horizontal and transverse platform vibrations are coupled by friction at the contact interfaces which is assumed to follow the classical discontinuous Coulomb’s law of friction. The vertical motion of the dampers leads to time-varying contact forces and can cause horizontal stick-slip motion between the contact surfaces. Due to the relative horizontal motion between the dampers and the blade platform, the vertical contact forces and the resultant friction forces act as moving loads. The Finite Element (FE) method and Modal Superposition (MS) method are applied to solve the dynamic response, together with an algorithm that can capture nonsmooth transitions from stick to slip and slip to stick. Quasi-periodic vibration is found even under harmonic excitation