I have had some opportunities to attend to few technical issues in rotordynamics in general and probably none on bladed systems in particular. Even though we have robust fundamental capabilities such as simulating cyclic symmetry conditions, centrifugal force loading for static procedures, substructuring, periodic loading, modal evaluation and harmonic steady state analysis, generating Campbell diagram plots and few additional capabilities, it is probably ok to say that legacy usage is more in this domain. Customers use software such as DyRoBes, XL Rotor, ANSYS, Fluent and so on in the turbines, compressors industries that are heavy on rotordynamics simulations. I took some interest to investigate this area to understand some of these capabilities of Abaqus. I have taken the example of a quarter cyclic symmetric model with 6-blades to make some initial structural evaluations (examples are shared).

In near future, the effort is going to be to run a cyclic symmetric model with loads applied in different harmonics to mimic the impact of nozzle jet through the diffuser vanes. This can be used to study the bladed rotor system in more detail. In industrial setting on an actual workflow will involve running a CFD analysis to obtain the forces (periodic) impacting the blades and then do a steady state evaluation to obtain the stresses and peak deflections in the blades and root. This will serve as a comprehensive workflow implementation for such bladed system rotordynamics.