scholarly journals Adjoint-Based Aeroelastic Design Optimization Using a Harmonic Balance Method

Author(s):  
Nitish Anand ◽  
Antonio Rubino ◽  
Piero Colonna ◽  
Matteo Pini

Abstract Turbomachinery blades characterized by highly-loaded, slender profiles and operating under unsteady flow may suffer from aeroelastic shortcomings, like forced response and flutter. One of the ways to mitigate these aeroelastic effects is to redesign the blade profiles, so as to increase aero-damping and decrease aero-forcing. Design optimization based on high-fidelity aeroelastic analysis methods is a formidable task due to the inherent computational cost. This work presents an adjoint-based aeroelastic shape-optimization framework based on reduced order methods for flow analysis and forced response computation. The flow analysis is carried out through a multi-frequency fully-turbulent harmonic balance method, while the forced response is computed by means of the energy method. The capability of the design framework is demonstrated by optimizing two candidate cascades, namely, i) a transonic compressor cascade and, ii) a supersonic impulse turbine rotor operating with toluene as working fluid, initially designed by means of the method of waves. The outcomes of the optimization show significant improvements in terms of forced-response in both cases as a consequence of aero-damping enhancement.

Author(s):  
Shangguan Bo ◽  
Zili Xu ◽  
Qilin Wu ◽  
XianDing Zhou ◽  
ShouHong Cao

To understand the mechanism of interfacial damping of axial loosely assembled dovetail to suppress blade vibration, a dry friction force model is presented by the Coulomb friction law and the macroslip model, and the mathematical expression of the friction force is derived. The nonlinear friction force is linearized as an equivalent stiffness and an equivalent damping through the one-term harmonic balance method. The effect of centrifugal force on the equivalent stiffness and the equivalent damping is studied. The forced response of one simplified blade with loosely assembled dovetail attachment is predicted by the harmonic balance method, in which the blade is described by the lumped mass and spring model, and the friction contact joints is simplified as a ideal friction damper. The results show that the equivalent stiffness of loosely assembled dovetail attachment increases with blade centrifugal force, gradually reaches a certain value, and there exists the maximum value for the equivalent stiffness. The equivalent damping increases at the beginning and then decreases with blade centrifugal force increasing, there exists a maximum too. The resonant frequency of blade rises with blade centrifugal force, but it no longer increases when the centrifugal force exceed a certain value. There exists a special centrifugal force on which the effect of dry friction damping is the best.


Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Weiss ◽  
Venkataramanan Subramanian ◽  
Kenneth C. Hall

A nonlinear harmonic balance method for the simulation of turbomachinery flows is presented. The method is based on representing an unsteady, time periodic flow by a Fourier series in time and then solving a set of mathematically steady-state equations to obtain the Fourier coefficients. The steady-state solutions are stored at discrete time levels distributed throughout one period of unsteadiness and are coupled via the physical time derivative and at periodic boundaries. Implicit coupling between time levels is achieved in a computationally efficient manner through approximate factorization of the linear system that results from the discretized equations. Unsteady, rotor-stator interactions are performed to validate the implementation. Results based on the harmonic balance method are compared against those obtained using a full unsteady, time-accurate calculation using moving meshes. The implicitly coupled nonlinear harmonic balance method is shown to produce a solution of reasonable accuracy compared to the full unsteady approach but with significantly less computational cost.


AIAA Journal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 741-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong-Kyun Im ◽  
Jang Hyuk Kwon ◽  
Soo Hyung Park

Author(s):  
Chad H. Custer ◽  
Jonathan M. Weiss ◽  
Venkataramanan Subramanian ◽  
William S. Clark ◽  
Kenneth C. Hall

The harmonic balance method implemented within STAR-CCM+ is a mixed frequency/time domain computational fluid dynamic technique, which enables the efficient calculation of time-periodic flows. The unsteady solution is stored at a small number of fixed time levels over one temporal period of the unsteady flow in a single blade passage in each blade row; thus the solution is periodic by construction. The individual time levels are coupled to one another through a spectral operator representing the time derivative term in the Navier-Stokes equation, and at the boundaries of the computational domain through the application of periodic and nonreflecting boundary conditions. The blade rows are connected to one another via a small number of fluid dynamic spinning modes characterized by nodal diameter and frequency. This periodic solution is driven to the correct solution using conventional (steady) CFD acceleration techniques, and thus is computationally efficient. Upon convergence, the time level solutions are Fourier transformed to obtain spatially varying Fourier coefficients of the flow variables. We find that a small number of time levels (or, equivalently, Fourier coefficients) are adequate to model even strongly nonlinear flows. Consequently, the method provides an unsteady solution at a computational cost significantly lower than traditional unsteady time marching methods. The implementation of this nonlinear harmonic balance method within STAR-CCM+ allows for the simulation of multiple blade rows. This capability is demonstrated and validated using a 1.5 stage cold flow axial turbine developed by the University of Aachen. Results produced using the harmonic balance method are compared to conventional time domain simulations using STAR-CCM+, and are also compared to published experimental data. It is shown that the harmonic balance method is able to accurately model the unsteady flow structures at a computational cost significantly lower than unsteady time domain simulation.


Author(s):  
Javier Crespo ◽  
Roque Corral ◽  
Jesus Pueblas

An implicit harmonic balance method for modeling the unsteady non-linear periodic flow about vibrating airfoils in turbomachinery is presented. As departing point, an implicit edge-based three-dimensional Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations solver for unstructured grids that runs both on central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) is used. The harmonic balance method performs a spectral discretization of the time derivatives and marches in pseudo-time a new system of equations where the unknowns are the variables at different time samples. The application of the method to vibrating airfoils is discussed. It is shown that a time spectral scheme may achieve the same temporal accuracy at a much lower computational cost than a Backward Finite Difference method at the expense of using more memory. The performance of the implicit solver has been assessed with several application examples. A speed-up factor of 10 is obtained between the spectral and finite difference version of the code whereas and an additional speed-up factor of 10 is obtained when the code is ported to GPUs, totalizing a speed factor of 100. The performance of the solver in GPUs has been assessed using the 10th standard aeroelastic configuration and a transonic compressor.


Author(s):  
Ender Cigeroglu ◽  
Ning An ◽  
Chia-Hsiang Menq

In this paper, a forced response prediction method for the analysis of constrained and unconstrained structures coupled through frictional contacts is presented. This type of frictional contact problem arises in vibration damping of turbine blades, in which dampers and blades constitute the unconstrained and constrained structures, respectively. The model of the unconstrained/free structure includes six rigid body modes and several elastic modes, the number of which depends on the excitation frequency. In other words, the motion of the free structure is not artificially constrained. When modeling the contact surfaces between the constrained and free structure, discrete contact points along with contact stiffnesses are distributed on the friction interfaces. At each contact point, contact stiffness is determined and employed in order to take into account the effects of higher frequency modes that are omitted in the dynamic analysis. Depending on the normal force acting on the contact interfaces, quasistatic contact analysis is initially employed to determine the contact area as well as the initial preload or gap at each contact point due to the normal load. A friction model is employed to determine the three-dimensional nonlinear contact forces, and the relationship between the contact forces and the relative motion is utilized by the harmonic balance method. As the relative motion is expressed as a modal superposition, the unknown variables, and thus the resulting nonlinear algebraic equations in the harmonic balance method, are in proportion to the number of modes employed. Therefore the number of contact points used is irrelevant. The developed method is applied to a bladed-disk system with wedge dampers where the dampers constitute the unconstrained structure, and the effects of normal load on the rigid body motion of the damper are investigated. It is shown that the effect of rotational motion is significant, particularly for the in-phase vibration modes. Moreover, the effect of partial slip in the forced response analysis and the effect of the number of harmonics employed by the harmonic balance method are examined. Finally, the prediction for a test case is compared with the test data to verify the developed method.


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