Composite materials in aircraft engine blades

Abstract

The article investigates the strength of the propeller blades made of a multilayer composite material, subjected to centrifugal and gas loads with various combinations of fiberglass and carbon fiber and orientation of the material base. The finite element method is used as a research method. A propeller blade used in turbines of jet engines and compressors, made of composite materials, is considered as a naturally twisted rod, provided that the hypothesis of flat sections across the thickness of a multilayer composite package is valid under conditions of rigid contact at the boundary of layers. The propfan blade model is modeled by four-node finite elements of natural curvature with forty-eight degrees of freedom, taking into account the compression of the normal. The applied method for calculating the strength makes it possible to assess the strength of an arbitrarily reinforced blade in sections and layer by layer. The blades of hydrodynamic engines of the first and second stages were considered under the action of centrifugal and gas loads. The stress was determined at 17 points of 21 cross-sections in layers. As a result of the study, the strength parameters of the blades with different ratios of the dissimilar materials of the layers of the multilayer composite material were obtained. Conclusions are drawn, based on the fact that the blades made of composite material have significant advantages in terms of strength and weight characteristics compared to blades made of materials traditionally used in technology in the manufacture of propfans.