Aeroelastic analysis of a turbine blade using a reduced-order model

The following work examines a turbine blade as a rotating cantilever beam fixed to a rigid hub. The first three natural mode shapes of the structure were determined using ANSYS-10.0. Unsteady computational fluid dynamic analysis was conducted to achieve the fluid response due to the natural modes of vibration of the rotating blade. A reduced-order model was used to couple the structural and aerodynamic system data. This resulted in an eigenfunction in the determination of a transfer function whose poles define the stability of the aeroelastic system. The same transfer function can be used to study problems of aeroelastic response of a turbine blade to arbitrary inputs such as due to structural damage or unbalanced mass.