Influence of Inlet Distortions on the Forced Vibration of a High Pressure Compressor Rig

The accurate prediction of blade vibrations is a key factor for the development of reliable turbomachines. This paper focusses on forced vibrations. The excitation frequency is an integer multiple of the rotor revolution frequency, which is commonly called engine order. Aerodynamic excitation of blades is created by stator wakes or the potential fields of downstream obstacles, which usually leads to high engine orders correlating to the number of vanes. Resonance crossings appear at higher frequencies corresponding to higher modes. Besides high engine orders, low engine orders not related to the number of vanes may exist. They can be caused by a disturbance of the perfect cyclic symmetry of the flow pattern due to geometry variations or inlet distortions. Inlet distortions result from installation effects, maneuvers or crosswind. Low engine orders affect fundamental modes at high engine speeds. High static loads due to centrifugal forces combined with dynamic excitation and low damping may lead to unacceptable high stresses.

This paper aims at getting a better understanding of the simulative prediction of low engine order excitation with special focus on inlet distortions. Under investigation is a 4.5 stage research compressor rig, for which an extensive amount of test data is available. A three dimensional CFD-model of the compressor is used to compute the forcings generated by different distortion patterns. The first two stages are modeled as a full-annulus, which allows to fully resolve the spatial content of the inlet distortion patterns. The rotor 2 blisk is of special interest in this investigation. The propagation of the distortion after stage 2 with rotor 2 is not of interest, therefore the downstream stages are modeled as single passages in order to save computational time. The distortion patterns are the outcome of traversals of different screens with total pressure probes. During distortion measurements, the screens located in the inlet duct were rotated relative to the fixed instrumentation. The traversals in resonance of the first bending mode of rotor 2 with a low engine order four showed a dependency of the screen angle on the vibration amplitude. Acceleration and deceleration maneuvers through this resonance were conducted with screen angles set to those of smallest and highest response. Vibration amplitudes of the blisk rotor are measured by strain gauges and a blade tip timing system. Simulation results are compared against vibration measurements. Aerodynamic damping is calculated with the influence coefficient method. The effects of mistuning are included in the calculation of vibration amplitudes via a subset of nominal system modes model to give a meaningful comparison against real engine hardware. The mistuning distribution of the blisk was identified at rest for the fundamental bending mode. The presence of a 2^nd excitation mechanism of unknown source explains the observed test data. This unknown source is not included in the CFD model. A direct comparison of simulation and measurement is still possible by leveraging the observed superposition effects of both excitation sources. The consequent approach is to identify and substract the forcing due to the unknown source, leaving only the delta forcing due to inlet distortions.