Parametric study on the flutter sensitivity of a wide-chord hollow fan blade

In recent years, the hollow fan blades have been widely used to meet the demand for light weight and good performance of the aero-engine. However, the relationship between the hollow structure and the aeroelastic stability has not been studied yet in the open literature. In this paper, it has been investigated for an H-shaped hollow fan blade. Before studying the flutter behavior, the methods of parametric modeling and auto-generation of Finite Element Model (FEM) are presented. The influence of the feature parameters on the vibration frequency and mode shape (as the input of flutter calculation) of the first three modes are analyzed by the Orthogonal Experimental Design (OED) method. The results show that the parameters have a more remarkable impact on the first torsional mode and thus it is concerned in the flutter sensitivity analysis. Compared with the solid blade, the minimum aerodynamic damping of the hollow blade decreases, indicating that the hollow structure makes the aeroelastic stability worse. For the parameters describing the hollow section, the rib number N has the greatest influence on the minimum aerodynamic damping, followed by the wall thickness W₅. For the parameters in the height of hollow segment, the aerodynamic damping increases with the increase of parameters M₁ and M₂. This means that reducing the height of the hollow segment is helpful to improve the aeroelastic stability. Compared with the impact of parameters in hollow section, the variation of aerodynamic damping caused by the height of the hollow segment is small.