Classical flutter study in turbomachinery cascade using boundary element method for incompressible flows

Abstract

In this paper aeroelastic stability in steam turbine rotor is carried out using boundary element method. A mesh free fluid solver is developed for fast estimation of unsteady aerodynamic loading and to estimate the aerodynamic damping in 3D blade cascade. The aerodynamic damping is estimated traveling wave mode method. The unsteady incompressible flow field is modeled using Panel method. The structural part is modeled with non-linear beam element method based finite element method. Both solvers are loosely coupled to perform aeroelastic (flutter) co-simulation. The simulated results are validated with experimental results on 3D blade cascade. The proposed methodology successfully estimates aerodynamic damping with acceptable accuracy the for the aeroelastic (classical flutter) analysis of turbine blade cascade. Moreover, present aeroelastic method shows significant reduction in computational time.