Dynamic behavior of aero-engine rotor with fusing design suffering blade off

Fan blade off (FBO) from a running turbofan rotor will introduce sudden unbalance into the dynamical system, which will lead to the rub-impact, the asymmetry of rotor and a series of interesting dynamic behavior. The paper first presents a theoretical study on the response excited by sudden unbalance. The results reveal that the reaction force of the bearing located near the fan could always reach a very high value which may lead to the crush of ball, journal sticking, high stress on the other components and some other failures to endanger the safety of engine in FBO event. Therefore, the dynamic influence of a safety design named “fusing” is investigated by mechanism analysis. Meantime, an explicit FBO model is established to simulate the FBO event, and evaluate the effectiveness and potential dynamic influence of fusing design. The results show that the fusing design could reduce the vibration amplitude of rotor, the reaction force on most bearings and loads on mounts, but the sudden change of support stiffness induced by fusing could produce an impact effect which will couple with the influence of sudden unbalance. Therefore, the implementation of the design should be considered carefully with optimized parameters in actual aero-engine.