59927 - Searching of the Optimal Arrangement of Mistuned Blades on the Basis of the Solution of Travelling Salesman Problem 

Imperfect manufacturing of rotor blades leads to a corruption of cyclic symmetry in the wheel and difference in blades natural frequencies. Blades mistuning may lead to a significant increasing of alternating stresses, which depend, inter alia, on the blades arrangement during wheel assembly. Therefore, the study of the influence of the blade arrangement in the wheel on the amplitudes of alternating stresses during assembly and search of the best combination of their arrangement in terms of alternating stresses minimization in conditions of resonant or near-resonant vibrations has practical interest.

The paper presents a solution to the traveling salesman problem for searching optimal blade arrangement in the wheel using the ant colony algorithm. The solution is presented for a reduced wheel model. Since approaches to the reduced models building and the use of combinatorial optimization methods, in particular to solving the traveling salesman problem for optimal blade arrangement, have already been published in the literature, the article focuses on demonstrating a simple software implementation of this method. This approach makes it possible assessing the effect of the blades assembly in the wheel on the amplitudes of alternating stresses quickly, even taking into account several restarts of the algorithm to determine other possible system configurations.