The high performance bladed-disks used in today’s turbomachines must meet strict standards in terms of aeroelastic stability and resonant response level. One structural characteristic that can significantly impact on both these area is that of bladed-disk mistuning. To predict the effects of mistuning, computationally efficient methods are necessary to make it feasible, especially in an industrial environment, to perform free vibration and forced response analyses of full assembly finite element models. Due to the size of typical finite element models of industrial bladed-disks, efficient reduction techniques must be used to systematically produce reduced order models. The objective of this paper is to compare two prevalent reduction methods on representative test rotors, including a modern design industrial shrouded bladed-disk, in terms of accuracy (for frequencies and mode shapes), reduction order, computational efficiency, sensitivity to inter-sector elastic coupling, and ability to capture the phenomenon of mode localization. The first reduction technique employs a modal reduction approach with a modal basis consisting of mode shapes of the tuned bladed-disk which can be obtained from a classical cyclic symmetric modal analysis. The second reduction technique is based on a Craig and Bampton substructuring and reduction approach. The results show a perfect agreement between the two reduced order models and the non-reduced finite element model. It is found that the phenomena of mode localization is equally well predicted by the two reduction models. In terms of computational cost, reductions from 1 to 2 orders of magnitude are obtained for the industrial bladed-disk, with the modal reduction method being the most computationally efficient approach.
Computationally efficient reduction of modal data from finite element models by nested sets of B-splines
