An Experimental Study on the Effects of Nonuniform Vane Spacing on Forced Response Reduction in a Mistuned Rotor Blisk in a Multistage Axial Compressor

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Abstract Stators with nonuniform vane spacing (NUVS) are known to effectively reduce the forced response of adjacent rotors by spreading the primary engine order (EO) excitation at a certain speed to a series of weaker excitations at nearby EOs over a wider speed range. To be used in a real gas turbine engine, it is essential to know the forced response vibratory reduction that can be achieved for a specific NUVS configuration at different operating conditions. The classical estimation method to predict the blade response reduction is to quantify the reduction of the forcing function at a potential resonance crossing by conducting a circumferential Fourier analysis of the asymmetric flow field. However, besides excitation reduction, the blade forced response also depends on other factors, such as damping and blade-to-blade interactions due to mistuning. To study the blade forced response reduction in a realistic environment, a comprehensive experimental study was conducted in the Purdue three-stage axial research compressor at three different loading conditions. The vibratory response of the first torsion (1 T) mode forced response of rotor 2 was measured by strain gages (SGs) for two different upstream stator 1 configurations: the symmetric 38-vaned stator 1 configuration and the NUVS stator 1 configuration with 18–20 vane halves. As expected, the strong 38EO-1T response from the symmetric stator reduced to a series of weaker responses from 35EO to 41EO in the NUVS configuration. The overlap of adjacent EO responses caused considerable beating phenomena in the blade SG time–history data. There was substantial blade-to-blade variation in blade response for both symmetric and asymmetric stator 1 configurations due to the inherent nonintentional mistuning in the rotor 2 blisk. This, in turn, causes a large blade-to-blade variation in the reduction factors. While higher responding blades tend to have larger reduction factors, some blades show almost no forced response reduction when switching to the NUVS stator. In addition, the reduction factors for each blade and the maximum reduction factor for the whole blisk also change significantly with loading conditions. The measured reduction factors and the peak response EO are not well predicted by the classical estimation method. This indicates that both damping and mistuning effects need to be considered in the NUVS reduction factor prediction.