Wavy Trailing Edge Feasibility for Aircraft Engine Composite Fan Blade

Abstract

Attempts to add the advanced technologies to aerospace composite structures like fan blade have been on in recent times to further improve its performance. As part of these efforts, it has been proposed that the wavy trailing edge could be used in the blade to reduce the noise level. It has been also proposed that it’s structural feasibility could be studied by fabricating coupons representing blade like boundary conditions and mimicking max strain contours of wavy trailing edge of blade and testing them. Suitable size coupons (baseline flat and ones with wavy edge) were designed, and appropriate boundary condition was suggested for tests. The four-point bend tests were performed on baseline flat and wavy edge coupons and after analyzing the results it was concluded that some wavy edge configurations coupons do show some knock down in the failure load/strain but the optimized wavy edge configuration coupons show almost no knockdown (within scatter) in the failure load/strains. This leads to the conclusion that the wavy edge configuration under consideration has sufficient structural integrity as per the representative coupon test