Coupled Fluid-structure Flutter Analysis of a Transonic Fan

A coupled fluid-structure method is developed for flutter analysis of blade vibrations in turbomachinery. The approach is based on the time domain solution of the fluid-structure interaction in which the aerodynamic and structural equations are marched simultaneously in time. The three-dimensional (3D) unsteady Reynolds average Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are solved with a multiblock finite volume scheme on dynamic deforming grids to evaluate the aerodynamic force. Dual time-stepping technique and an efficient implicit scheme with multigrid are employed to march the solution in time. The blade vibration is modeled with an aeroelasticity model in which blade motion is computed by linear combination of responses of each mode under unsteady loads. The code is validated in prediction of the unsteady flow flutter behavior of an oscillating cascade and is applied to flutter analysis of a transonic fan at the design speed.