Vibration absorbers for a rotating flexible structure with cyclic symmetry: nonlinear path design

This paper analytically investigates the nonlinear dynamics of order-tuned vibration absorbers applied to cyclic rotating flexible structures under traveling wave (TW) engine-order excitation. The primary cyclic structure is assumed to be governed by linear vibrations and the nonlinear absorber response arises from large amplitude kinematic effects. These dynamics are captured by a lumped-parameter model that consists of N blades with one blade mode and one absorber per blade, which are arranged with cyclic symmetry on a rotating disk. The governing equations of motion are formulated for arbitrary absorber paths to allow investigation of the absorber path design for nonlinear response. This paper extends previous work by the authors, which considered the linearized blade and absorber dynamics of a similar system. Several intriguing features of the dynamics were uncovered, most notably the existence of an absorber tuning range that avoids resonance at any rotation speed. Of particular interest is the existence and stability of the steady-state TW response to TW excitation, as experienced in turbomachinery, and how these are affected by selection of the absorber paths, which fix the linear and nonlinear tuning characteristics. It is shown that the TW response, which is unique for the linearized system, also exists for the weakly nonlinear model and can be captured by an equivalent two degree of freedom model obtained using the symmetry of the excitation and system response. The forced response exhibits the usual characteristics of a weakly nonlinear system, specifically, bistability and the attendant hysteresis near resonance. More significantly, it does not experience any additional instabilities associated with the symmetry. That is, the desired TW response is robust to nonlinear effects in the absorber, which allows use of the simple equivalent model for selection of absorber tuning parameters. For good performance and robustness, the linear absorber tuning should be in the no-resonance zone described by the linear theory and the absorber paths should have a slightly softening nonlinear characteristic.