Improving Aeroelastic Stability of Bladed Disks with Topologically Optimized Piezoelectric Materials and Intentionally Mistuned Shunt Capacitance

It is well known that bladed disks with certain patterns of mistuning can have higher aeroelastic stability than their tuned counterparts. This requires small but accurate deviation of the mechanical properties on each blade sector, and currently it is difficult to realize by mechanical manufacturing. In this paper, we propose an adaptive strategy to realize the intentional mistuning for the improvement of aeroelastic stability. The basic idea is to bond or embed piezoelectric materials to each blade and use different shunt capacitance on each blade as the source of mistuning. When the shunt capacitance varies from zero (open-circuit, OC) to infinity (short-circuit, SC), the stiffness of each blade changes within a relatively small interval. In this way, the required small difference of stiffness among blades is altered into a relatively larger difference of the shunt capacitance. This provides a more feasible and robust way to implement the intentional mistuning, provided that the variation interval of blade stiffness between OC and SC contains the limits of required mistuning. Thus, it is critical to maximize the ability of changing the blade stiffness by shunt capacitance with limited amount of piezoelectric materials. To do so, a straightforward approach is proposed to get the best distribution of piezoelectric materials on the blade for the targeting mode. This approach is based on the FE model of the bladed disc, and the piezoelectric materials are introduced by replacing elements (if they are embedded) or adding an extra layer of elements (if they are bonded). An empirical balded disc with NASA-ROTOR37 profile is used as the example. With a proper design of the mistuning pattern and replace use piezoelectric materials of only 10% the blade mass, the proposed method can significantly improve the aeroelastic stability of bladed disks.