A REVIEW OF AEROELASTICITY METHODS WITH EMPHASIS ON TURBOMACHINERY APPLICATIONS

This paper is a review of current aeroelasticity methods, with particu lar emphasis on turbomachinery applications. It also includes a brief survey of the computational fluid dynamics procedures that can be used for the modelling of unsteady flows in such environments. The aeroela sticity phenomena encountered in turbomachinery are introduced from an industrial perspective and the predictive methods are divided into tw o classes: classical and integrated. The former combine the fluid and structural equations in an uncoupled fashion while the latter attempt to solve the equations together by either exchanging information at ea ch time step or by formulating the aeroelasticity problem in a single unified fluid-structure medium. Further topics, such as the availabili ty of experimental data for model validation, nonlinear structural beh aviour, general interblade phase angle, blade mistuning and future dir ections in aeroelasticity analyses, are also discussed in some detail. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited