Contribution by Michelle Meier, Oleg Shiryayev, and Joseph Slater

Wright State University 

Article originally released on www.simulia.com

 Damage detection in aircraft engines and their subcomponents is an important challenge for cost, performance, and safety of systems. Due to the large amount of kinetic energy stored in the moving parts of the engine, fatigue cracks can cause uncontained engine failures, which may have catastrophic consequences. Debris flying out of the engine may damage vital aircraft systems leading to loss of control and consequent crash, or fatalities on board the aircraft after penetrating the fuselage.

Fatigue cracks result in very little loss of material and do not have a significant effect on the natural frequencies and mode shapes. They do become observable, however, when looking at the characteristic of the crack as it opens and closes during vibration. Opening and closing of the crack results in a very localized nonlinear elastic behavior. Wright State University employed Abaqus FEA software suite to investigate the possibility of utilizing nonlinear vibration phenomena for detection of fatigue damage in turbomachinery components.

?The attached paper was presented at the 50th AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics & Materials Conference, Palm Springs, CA, May 2009. Paper reference AIAA-2009-2671.