The Effect of Non-Conservative Compressive Force on the Vibration of Rotating Composite Blades

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a resonance avoidance concept for composite rotor blades featuring extension–twist elastic coupling. The concept uses a tendon, attached to the tip of the blade, to apply a proper amount of compressive force to tune the vibration behavior of the blade actively. The tendon is simulated by applying a non-conservative axial compressive force applied to the blade tip. The main load carrying part of the structure is the composite spar box, which has an antisymmetric layup configuration. The nonlinear dynamic behavior of the composite blade is modelled by using the geometrically exact fully intrinsic beam equations. The resulting nonlinear differential equations are discretized using a time–space scheme, and the stationary and rotating frequencies of the blade are obtained. It is observed that the proposed resonance avoidance mechanism is effective for tuning the vibration behavior of composite blades. The applied compressive force can shift the frequencies and the location at which the frequency veering take place. Furthermore, the compressive force can also cause the composite blade to get unstable depending on the layup ply angle. Finally, the results, highlighting the importance of compressive force and ply angle on the dynamic behavior of composite blades, are presented and discussed