LOCALIZATION OF ENERGY IN A PERFECTLY SYMMETRIC BLADED DISK ASSEMBLY DUE TO NONLINEARITIES

Although a bladed disk is typically designed to have identical blades, manufacturing tolerances, wear, and other causes may cause random deviations among the blades. The blade-to-blade discrepancies, denoted as mistuning, lead to vibratory responses mostly concentrated in small regions of the bladed-disk assembly, according to a phenomenon called localization. The resulting spatial confinement of the vibration energy causes the responses of some blades to become dangerously high and increases the amplitude of the bladed-disk assembly's overall response. The attendant increase in stresses can lead to premature high cycle fatigue (HCF) of the blades. In this study we investigate whether vibration localization in a perfectly symmetric bladed disk assembly may occur in the presence of nonlinearity. To this end, the nonlinear normal modes (NNMs) of a simplified model of a bladed disk assembly are computed. The NNMs are then carefully examined to highlight possible vibration localization phenomena.