Aerodynamic damping of an oscillating fan blade: Mesh-based and meshless fluid structure interaction analysis

This paper shows that both numerical models are suitable for modelling the aerodynamic damping of an axial fan used in an air cooled condenser fan unit. The observed flow effects include the formation and shedding of leading edge vortices, downwash, tip vortices and the added mass effect. Leading edge vortices are a major damping contributor and are found to mainly depend on the blade's effective angle of attack. The mesh-based and meshless FSI simulations are able to predict the experimentally determined tip displacement within an accuracy of 13% for 5 out of 6 simulations.