Unilateral contact induced blade/casing vibratory interactions in impellers: Analysis for flexible casings with friction and abradable coating

Abstract

This contribution addresses the vibratory analysis of unilateral contact induced structural interactions between a bladed impeller and its surrounding flexible casing. It extends the numerical developments exposed in a previous paper to flexible casings. The casing finite element model and the construction of the associated reduced-order model for efficient computations are first exposed in detail along with an extensive presentation of the smoothing strategy implemented on the contact interface. The proposed algorithms embedding unilateral contact conditions together with abradable coating removal are subsequently introduced and validated through a systematic analysis of (1) the nonlinear procedure for the computation of impeller/casing distances, (2) the treatment of three-dimensional friction and contact forces, (3) the correction of the displacements when unilateral contact or abradable removal arises, and (4) the possible hybrid contact scenarii involving localized total removal of the abradable coating. Finally, two illustrative case studies show that the linear interaction condition, commonly considered for the safe design of impellers and casings in turbomachinery, may be advantageously combined with the presented numerical strategy in order to assess the actual importance of predicted critical speeds.