Coupled Fluid-structure Aeroelastic Analysis of Turbomachinery Using Conservative Data Transfer Algorithm

The thinner blades with high aerodynamic loading in modern fans and compressors become more susceptible to fluid induced vibration, thus affecting the safe operation of the aero-engine. A coupled fluid-structure interaction method which adopts an in-house CFD code and an open-source structure analysis software CalculiX is developed for flutter analysis of turbomachinery. In this method, conservative and accurate data transfer has been realized at the non-matching mesh interfaces between the fluid and solid domain by using a novel interpolation method, and which is based on locally dimensionality reduction and cell surface integration. The comparisons with other commonly used data transfer methods at the fluid and structure interfaces such as consistent interpolation and radial basis functions interpolation have been carried out. The results showed that the proposed method has good performance and robustness in converting the fluid pressure and viscosity stress into the loads of the structure nodes at the coupling interface. Then the coupled fluidstructure interaction method was applied to predict the aeroelastic characteristics of NASA Rotor 67 and STCF4. The aerodynamic damping coefficients attained by the coupled fluid-structure interaction method agree well with the experimental data or the computational results by other researchers, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed interface data transfer method in turbomachinery flutter analysis.