FUTURE · Flutter-Free Turbomachinery Blades

FUTURE brings together European and international well reputed centres-of-excellence in order to reach major scientific & technical objectives in striving towards flutter-free turbomachine blades. By advancing the state-of-the-art in flutter prediction capabilities and design rules, the FUTURE project will lead to benefits in terms of decreased development cost, reduced weight and fuel consumption, and increased ability to efficiently manage flutter problems occurring on engines at service. Eight interconnected turbine and compressor experiments will be performed in the project, in combination with numerical modelling of vibrating blades and the related unsteady aerodynamics. Cascade experiments will be employed to study unsteady aerodynamic properties in detail. These tests are supporting more complex rotating turbomachinery tests (turbine and compressor) to study the addressed phenomenon in engine-typical environment. The knowledge from both component tests will be then condensed into “best practice” for both experimental and computational (CFD) set-ups, and will be used towards a combined effort of physical understanding of travelling waves and interferences between the vibrating structures and the surrounding fluid. The acquired knowledge is aimed to be employed by the aeroelastic specialists in the companies, research institutes and universities to identify updated and better aeromechanical design rules. In the process of reaching this unique knowledge status a sophisticated, not yet available, measuring technique will be developed, and a new excitation mechanism will be implemented as back-up to the free-flutter experiments. Furthermore, a unique database with combined structural and unsteady aerodynamic results will be established and made available for further dissemination among the partners. This database will contain significantly more detailed data than any other existing database in the world.