A Methodology for Predicting the Response of Blades With Nonlinear Coatings

Ceramic coatings applied by air plasma spray or electron beam techniques as thermal barrier coatings or to improve the erosion or corrosion resistance of blades in gas turbine engines are found to add damping to the system. However, such coatings display nonlinear mechanical properties in that the Young’s modulus and the measure of damping are dependent on the amplitude of cyclic strain. To account for the coating nonlinearity, a new methodology for predicting blade response was developed and applied to an actual component coated with a titania-alumina blend ceramic infiltrated with a viscoelastic material. Resonant frequencies, mode shapes, and the forced response of a one blade segment of an integrated disk from a fan stage rotor were computed and compared with results from bench tests. Predicted frequencies agreed satisfactorily with measured values; predicted and observed values of system damping agreed to within 10%. The results of these comparisons are taken to indicate that it is possible to use laboratory-determined material properties together with an iterative finite element analysis to obtain satisfactory predictions of the response of an actual blade with a nonlinear coating.