A numerical methodology is described to study the influence of the contact location and contact condition of friction damper in aircraft engines. A simplified beam model is used to represent the blade for the preliminary design stage. The frictional damper is numerically analyzed based on two parameters, contact angle and vertical position of the platform. The nonlinear modal analysis is used to investigate the nonlinear dynamic behavior and damping performances of the system. The harmonic balanced method with the continuation technique is used to compute the nonlinear modes for a large range of energy levels. By using such a modeling strategy, the modal damping ratio, resonant amplitude, and resonant frequency are directly and efficiently computed for a range of design parameters. Monte Carlo simulations together with Latin hypercube sampling is then used to assess the robustness of the frictional damper, whose contact parameters involve much uncertainties due to manufacturing tolerance and also wear effects. The influences of those two parameters are obtained, and the best performances of the frictional damper can be achieved when the contact angle is around 25 deg–30 deg. The vertical position of the platform is highly mode dependent, and other design considerations need to be accounted. The results have proved that the uncertainties that involved contact surfaces do not have significant effects on the performance of frictional damper.

Integrally bladed disks (blisk) have been widely used in the turbo-machinery industry due to its high aerodynamic performance and structural efficiency. A friction ring damper (FRD) is usually integrated in the system to improve its low damping. However, the design of the geometry of this FRD become complex and computationally expensive due to the strong nonlinearities from friction interfaces. In this work, we propose an efficient modelling strategy based on advanced nonlinear modal analysis and Kriging surrogate models to design and optimize the geometry of a 3D FRD attached to a high fidelity full-scale blisk. The 3D ring damper is parametrised with a few key geometrical parameters. The impact of each geometric parameter and their sensitivities to nonlinear dynamic response can be efficiently assessed using Kriging meta-modelling based on a few damped nonlinear normal modes. Results demonstrate that the damping performances of ring dampers can be substantially optimized through the proposed modelling strategy whilst key insights for the design of the rings are given. It is also demonstrated that the distribution of the contact normal load on the contact interfaces has a strong influence on the damping performances and can be effectively tuned via the upper surface geometry of the ring dampers.

This work presents an assessment of classical and state of the art reduced order modeling (ROM) techniques to enhance the computational efficiency for dynamic analysis of jointed structures with local contact nonlinearities. These ROM methods include classical free interface method (Rubin method, MacNeal method), fixed interface method Craig-Bampton (CB), Dual Craig-Bampton (DCB) method and also recently developed joint interface mode (JIM) and trial vector derivative (TVD) approaches. A finite element (FE) jointed beam model is considered as the test case taking into account two different setups: one with a linearized spring joint and the other with a nonlinear macroslip contact friction joint. Using these ROM techniques, the accuracy of dynamic behaviors and their computational expense are compared separately. We also studied the effect of excitation levels, joint region size, and number of modes on the performance of these ROM methods.

The nonlinear modes of a non-conservative nonlinear system are sometimes referred to as damped nonlinear normal modes (dNNMs). Because of the non-conservative characteristics, the dNNMs are no longer periodic. To compute non-periodic dNNMs using classic methods for periodic problems, two concepts have been developed in the last two decades: complex nonlinear mode (CNM) and extended periodic motion concept (EPMC). A critical assessment of these two concepts applied to different types of non-conservative nonlinearities and industrial full-scale structures has not been thoroughly investigated yet. Furthermore, there exist two emerging techniques which aim at predicting the resonant solutions of a nonlinear forced response using the dNNMs: extended energy balance method (E-EBM) and nonlinear modal synthesis (NMS). A detailed assessment between these two techniques has been rarely attempted in the literature. Therefore, in this work, a comprehensive comparison between CNM and EPMC is provided through two illustrative systems and one engineering application. The EPMC with an alternative damping assumption is also derived and compared with the original EPMC and CNM. The advantages and limitations of the CNM and EPMC are critically discussed. In addition, the resonant solutions are predicted based on the dNNMs using both E-EBM and NMS. The accuracies of the predicted resonances are also discussed in detail.