Effect of spatial setting angle on vibration of elastically restrained rotating beams

Abstract

For a fully articulated rotor system, there may exist a spatial setting angle and elastically restrained root for each individual blade in rotation procedure due to flapping, drag and pitch hinges. Most of previous studies on rotating blades or beams focused on pitch angle and clamped root. In this paper, a three-dimensional dynamic model is proposed for elastically restrained rotating beams with spatial setting angle. The elastic deformation of the beam is expressed by three scalar variables in three-dimensional space including stretch deformation instead of the conventional axial deformation. The longitudinal shrinkage is considered to capture centrifugal forces. The penalty method is adopted to deal with the elastic constraints, which greatly simplifies the construction of admissible functions. A unified formulation is derived by a variational principle combined with Chebyshev orthogonal polynomials. One of the advantages of the present method is that any linearly independent and complete basis functions can be used as admissible function regardless of boundary conditions, and another advantage is that the present method is capable of handling arbitrary boundary conditions by only adjusting the values of penalty factor. The convergence and accuracy of the present method are validated by comparison, and the effects of boundary conditions, angular velocity and spatial setting angle on vibration characteristics are discussed in detail. The results show that natural frequencies increase as the spring stiffness rises in a certain range and the spatial setting angle plays a more significant role on dynamic characteristics for rotating beams.