Estimation of damping for turbine blades in non-stationary working conditions

Turbine blades are critical components in thermal power plants and their design process usually includes experimental tests in order to tune or confirm numerical analyses. These tests are generally carried out on full-scale rotors having some blades instrumented with strain gauges and usually involve a run-up and/or a run-down phase. The quantification of damping in these conditions is rather complicated, since the finite sweep velocity produces a distortion of the vibration amplitude in contrast to the Frequency-Response Function that would be expected for an infinitely slow crossing of the resonance. In this work, we show through a numerical simulation that the usual identification procedures lead to a systematic overestimation of damping due both to the finite sweep velocity, as well as to the variation of the blade natural frequency with the rotation speed. An identification procedure based on the time-frequency analysis is proposed and validated through numerical simulations.