Numerical Investigation of Abradable Coating Removal in Aircraft Engines Through Plastic Constitutive Law

Abstract In the field of turbomachines, better engine performances are achieved by reducing possible parasitic leakage flows through the closure of the clearance distance between blade tips and surrounding stationary casings and direct structural contact is now considered as part of the normal life of aircraft engines. In order to avoid catastrophic scenarios due to direct tip incursions into a bare metal housing, implementation of abradable coatings has been widely recognized as a robust solution offering several advantages: reducing potential nonrepairable damage to the incurring blade as well as adjusting operating clearances, in situ, to accept physical contact events. Nevertheless, the knowledge on the process of material removal affecting abradable coatings is very limited and it seems urgent to develop dedicated predicting numerical tools. The present work introduces a macroscopic model of the material removal through a piecewise linear plastic constitutive law which allows for real time access to the current abradable liner profile within a time-stepping approach of the explicit family. In order to reduce computational loads, the original finite element formulation of the blade of interest is projected onto a reduced-order basis embedding centrifugal stiffening. First results prove convergence in time and space and show that the frequency content of the blade response is clearly sensitive to the presence of abradable material. The continuous opening of the clearance between the blade tip and the casing due to the material removal yields larger amplitudes of motion and new scenarios of structural divergence far from the usual linear conditions provided by the well-known Campbell diagrams.