A Comparison of Two Finite Element Reduction Techniques for Mistuned Bladed Disks

The high performance bladed disks used in today’s turbomachines must meet strict standards in terms of aeroelastic stability and resonant response level. One structural characteristic that can significantly impact on both these areas is that of bladed disk mistuning. To predict the effects of mistuning, computational efficient methods are much needed to make free-vibration and forced-response analyses of full assembly finite element (FE) models feasible in both research and industrial environments. Due to the size and complexity of typical industrial bladed disk models, one must resort to robust and systematic reduction techniques to produce reduced-order models of sufficient accuracy. The objective of this paper is to compare two prevalent reduction methods on representative test rotors, including a modern design industrial shrouded bladed disk, in terms of accuracy (for frequencies and mode shapes), reduction order, computational efficiency, sensitivity to intersector elastic coupling, and ability to capture the phenomenon of mode localization. The first reduction technique employs a modal reduction approach with a modal basis consisting of mode shapes of the tuned bladed disk which can be obtained from a classical cyclic symmetric modal analysis. The second reduction technique uses Craig and Bampton substructure modes. The results show a perfect agreement between the two reduced-order models and the nonreduced finite element model. It is found that the phenomena of mode localization is equally well predicted by the two reduction models. In terms of computational cost, reductions from one to two orders of magnitude are obtained for the industrial bladed disk, with the modal reduction method being the most computationally efficient approach.