A review of aeroelasticity methods with emphasis on turbomachinery applications

This paper is a review of current aeroelasticity methods, with particular 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 aeroelasticity phenomena encountered in turbomachinery are introduced from an industrial perspective and the predictive methods are divided into two 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 each time step or by formulating the aeroelasticity problem in a single unified fluid-structure medium. Further topics, such as the availability of experimental data for model validation, nonlinear structural behaviour, general interblade phase angle, blade mistuning and future directions in aeroelasticity analyses, are also discussed in some detail. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited