Guided Tuning of Turbine Blades: A Practical Method to Avoid Operating at Resonance

In gas turbine applications, forced vibrations of turbine blades under resonant—or nearly resonant—conditions are undesirable. Usually in airfoil design procedures, at least the first three blade modes are required to be free of excitation in the operating speed range. However, not uncommonly, a blade may experience resonance at other higher natural frequencies. In an attempt to avoid resonant oscillations, the structural frequencies are tuned away from the excitation frequencies by changing the geometry of the blade. The typical iterative design process—of adding and removing material through restacking the airfoil sections—is laborious and in no way assures an optimal design. In response to the need for an effective and fast methodology, the guided tuning of turbine blades method (GTTB) is developed and presented in this paper. A practical tuning technique, the GTTB method is based on structural perturbations to the mass and stiffness at critical locations, as determined by the methodology described herein. This shifts the excited natural frequency out of the operating speed range, while leaving the other structural frequencies largely undisturbed. The methodology is demonstrated here in the redesign of an actual turbine blade. The numerical results are experimentally validated using a laser vibrometer. The results indicate that the proposed method is not computationally intensive and renders effective results that jibe with experiments.