Experimental Measurement of Dynamic Forces Generated during Short-Duration Contacts: Application to Blade-Casing Interactions in Aircraft Engines

The main purpose of this paper is to present an experimental set-up dedicated to the study of high speed interactions such as those occurring between the rotating blade and the casing of an aircraft engine compressor. A simplified approach of rotor/stator interaction was experimentally simulated for ranges of velocities and interaction depths varying from 60 m/s to 270 m/s and from 0.13 mm to 0.35 mm respectively. Only high speed orthogonal contact were studied. The device was made up of a ballistic bench projecting a sample of abradable material (M601) against an instrumented tool (Steel 42CrMo4) representing the simplified blade shape. In order to increase significantly the measurement system bandwidth and to measure accurately the high speed interaction forces, a correction method based on the principle of modal analysis was developed and successfully employed. This work provides new experimental data regarding the material behavior of M601 in high speed orthogonal cutting conditions. They were in good agreement with those already observed in the literature for velocities up to 100 m/s. These new results showed the non-linear increase of the mean interaction force with the velocity and incursion depth for the large range of velocities considered in this present work. Post-experiment observations gave evidence of two wear mechanisms: cutting and plastic deformation.