Identification of mistuning characterics of bladed disks from free response data - Part II

The focus of the present two-part investigation is on the estimation of the dynamic properties, i.e., masses, stiffnesses, natural frequencies, mode shapes and their statistical distributions, of turbomachine blades to be used in the accurate prediction of the forced response of mistuned bladed disks. As input to this process, it is assumed that the lowest natural frequencies of the blades alone have been experimentally measured, for example in a broach block test. Since the number of measurements is always less than the number of unknowns, this problem is indeterminate in nature. In this second part of the investigation, the maximum likelihood method (ML) will first be revisited and a thorough assessment of its reliability in a wide variety of conditions, including the presence of measurement noise, different distributions of blade structural properties, etc., will be conducted. Then, a technique that provides a bridge between the two identification methods introduced in Part I, i.e., the random modal stiffnesses (RMS) and maximum likelihood (ML) approaches, will be presented. This technique, termed the improved random modal stiffnesses (IRMS) method is based on the maximum likelihood concepts but yields a mistuning model similar to that of the random modal stiffnesses technique. Finally, the accuracy of the RMS, ML, and IRMS methods in predicting the forced response statistics of mistuned bladed disks will be investigated in the presence of close blade alone natural frequencies.