Modeling the Tensile Behaviour of a SiC/SiC Composite by Master Curves

Scatter in test results is common for relatively brittle materials such as ceramic matrix composites. The scatter may come from differences in material processing conditions, specimen machining/handling and from variations in test parameters for nominally the same test material. Large scatter in test results makes material modeling difficult. In the past, master curve concepts have been proposed to reduce scatter in tensile data and to interpret fatigue/creep results. In this paper, one such concept is examined in detail by applying it to the recent tensile test results of a SiC/SiC composite. It was found that the way to construct master curves did not apply to the CMC studied and thus a new master curve was developed to better represent the tensile data. In addition, the test data were analysed statistically based on the new master curve.

Identification of Bearing Coefficients of Flexible Rotor-Bearing Systems

The accuracy of stiffness and damping coefficients of bearings is critical for the rotordynamic analysis of rotating machinery. However, the influence of bearings depends on the design, manufacturing, assembly, and operating conditions of the bearings. Uncertainties occur quite often in manufacturing and assembly, which causes the inaccuracy of bearing predictions. An accurate and reliable in-situ identification method for the bearing coefficients is valuable to both analyses and industrial applications. The identification method developed in this research used the receptance matrices of flexible shafts from FEM modeling and the unbalance forces of trial masses to derive the displacements and reaction forces at bearing locations. Eight bearing coefficients are identified through a Total Least Square (TLS) procedure, which can handle noise effectively. A special feature of this method is that it can identify bearing coefficients at a specific operating speed, which make it suitable for the measurement of speed-dependent bearings, like hydrodynamic bearings. Numerical validation of this method is presented. The configurations of unbalance mass arrangements are discussed.

The μ Approach to Control of Active Magnetic Bearings

Many important industrial problems in the control of rotating machinery with active magnetic bearings concern the minimization of the rotor vibration response to poorly characterized disturbances at a single or several shaft locations, these typically not corresponding to those of a sensor or actuator. Herein, we examine experimental results of a multivariable controller obtained via μ synthesis with a laboratory test rig. These indicate that a significant improvement in performance can be obtained with a multivariable μ controller over that achieved with an optimal decentralized PD controller.

Structural Health Monitoring With Piezoelectric Active Sensors

A technology for non-intrusive real-time structural health monitoring using piezoelectric active sensors is presented. The approach is based on monitoring variations of the coupled electromechanical impedance of piezoelectric patches bonded to metallic structures in high-frequency bands. In each of these applications, a single piezoelectric element is used as both an actuator and a sensor. The resulting electromechanical coupling makes the frequency-dependent electric impedance spectrum of the PZT sensor a good mapping of the underlying structure’s acoustic signature. Moreover, incipient structural damage can be indicated by deviations of this signature from its original baseline pattern. Unique features of this technology include its high sensitivity to structural damage, non-intrusiveness to the host structure, and low cost of implementation. These features have potential for enabling on-board damage monitoring of critical or inaccessible aerospace structures and components, such as aircraft wing joints, and both internal and external jet engine components. Several exploratory applications will be discussed.

Rolling Element Bearing Non-Linearity Effects

Non-linearity effects in rolling element bearings arise from two sources, viz. the Hertzian force deformation relationship and the presence of clearance between the rolling elements and the bearing races. Assuming that centrifugal effects may be neglected and that the presence of axial preload is appropriately reflected in a corresponding change in the radial clearance, this paper analyses a simple test rig to illustrate that non-linear phenomena such as synchronous multistable and nonsynchronous motions are possible in simple rigid and flexible rotor systems subjected to unbalance excitation. The equations of motion of the rotor bearing system were solved by transient analysis using fourth order Runge Kutta. Of particular interest is the effect of clearance, governed in practice by bearing specification and the amount of preload, on the vibration behaviour of rotors supported by ball bearings and on the bearing load. It is shown that in the presence of positive clearance, there exists an unbalance excitation range during which the bearing is momentarily not transmitting force owing to contact loss, resulting in rolling element raceway impact with potentially relatively high bearing forces; and indicating that for long bearing life, operation with positive clearance should be avoided in the presence of such unbalance loading. Once the unbalance excitation is high enough to avoid such contact loss, it is the bearings with zero or negative clearance which produce maximum bearing forces.

Active Control Algorithms for the Control of Rotor Vibrations Using HSFDs

The Hybrid Squeeze Film Damper (HSFD) has proven itself to be an effective controlling device of vibration in rotating machinery. The critical stage in the development of the HSFD as an active vibration suppressant, is the development of the control algorithms for active control of rotor vibrations. This paper summarizes, evaluates and compares the control algorithms for HSFD supported rotors. Quantitative as well as qualitative measures of the effectiveness of the control algorithms are presented. The study includes the PID-type controllers, LQR, gain scheduling, adaptive and bang-bang controllers. The adaptive, gain scheduling and nonlinear proportional controllers, have proved to be quite effective in the active control of HSFD supported rotors, with impressive results.

A Test Rig for Frictionally Damped Bladed Segments

The paper describes the development of an instrumented test rig suitable to carry out vibration testing of the bladed segments of a turbine (belonging to a stator low pressure stage) in which the friction occurring at the contact of neighboring segments is used in service to damp the vibrations. The system is able to assign the desired preload to the segment and to measure the forces exerted in the contact and the relative displacements due to slipping. The main results that can be obtained concern the type of motion that takes place (stick/slip) and the effect of the interlocking on it, the friction coefficients, the contact tangential stiffness, and, more generally, the frequency response.

A Resonance Tracking Algorithm for the Prediction of Turbine Forced Response With Friction Dampers

This paper presents an iterative method for determining the resonant speed shift when non-linear friction dampers are included in turbine blade roots. Such a need arises when conducting response calculations for turbine blades where the unsteady aerodynamic excitation must be computed at the exact resonant speed of interest. The inclusion of friction dampers is known to raise the resonant frequencies by up to 20% from the standard assembly frequencies. The iterative procedure uses a viscous, time-accurate flow representation for determining the aerodynamic forcing, a look-up table for evaluating the aerodynamic boundary conditions at any speed, and a time-domain friction damping module for resonance tracking. The methodology was applied to an HP turbine rotor test case where the resonances of interest were due to the 1T and 2F blade modes under 40 engine-order excitation. The forced response computations were conducted using a multi-stage approach in order to avoid errors associated with “linking” single stage computations since the spacing between the two bladerows was relatively small. Three friction damper elements were used for each rotor blade. To improve the computational efficiency, the number of rotor blades was decreased by 2 to 90 in order to obtain a stator/rotor blade ratio of 4/9. However, the blade geometry was skewed in order to match the capacity (mass flow rate) of the components and the condition being analysed. Frequency shifts of 3.2% and 20.0% were predicted for the 1T/40EO and 2F/40EO resonances in about 3 iterations. The predicted frequency shifts and the dynamic behaviour of the friction dampers were found to be within the expected range. Furthermore, the measured and predicted blade vibration amplitudes showed a good agreement, indicating that the methodology can be applied to industrial problems.

Implementation of a Multivariable Control

A multivariable control (MVC) was designed and implemented for the Joint Technology Demonstrator Engine (JTDE) XTE65-2. The engine control system utilized an existing MC68000 processor that used fixed point ADA for its programming language and was limited in throughput and memory. A canonical formulation for the MVC compensator was used to minimize memory and calculation load on the processor. Use of this formulation resulted in a number of numerical difficulties. This paper relates the issues associated with the implementation of a MVC in this environment, and some approaches to solve these difficulties.

Performance Seeking Control of Regenerative Gas Turbine Engines

A Performance Seeking Control (PSC) can realize the operations advantageous enough to accomplish the economy, safety, engine life, and environmental issues by reducing the control margin to the extremity together with selection of the control variables so that various kinds of parameters will be minimized or maximized. This paper describes the results obtained from the simulation study concerning the PSC aiming at the efficiency enhancement, power improvement, and longer engine life of a two-spool regenerative gas turbine engine having two control variables. By constructing the dynamic simulation of the engine, steady-state characteristics and dynamic characteristics are derived; then, a PSC system is designed and evaluated. It is concluded that the PSC for the gas turbine of this type can be realized by the turbine inlet temperature control.