Introduction

NOVA is an engineering software, based on a set of novel models and algorithms, aimed at structural dynamic analysis of mechanical components – mainly, but not only – in aerospace and turbomachinery industries. In particular, NOVA is developed for efficient and accurate prediction of the nonlinear vibratory response of mechanical assemblies (e.g. bladed disks in gas turbines/aero-engines) coupled with friction joints.

Technical features

In turbomachinery applications, high cycle fatigue (HCF) failure of turbine/compressor blades due to high vibration amplitudes at resonance is one of the main concerns in their design stage. To suppress excessive vibrations in the blades and prevent HCF, dry friction damping has been widely incorporated into the design of bladed disks. Motivated by the turbomachinery community’s need for practical design tools that can account for realistic operating conditions (e.g. consideration of friction damping), NOVA enables designers and analysts to perform efficient nonlinear forced response analysis of mechanical assemblies with friction interfaces.

Possible Applications

• Non-linear dynamic analysis of bladed discs in the aerospace and turbomachinery industries (for example in aircraft engines or gas turbines);
• Linear dynamic analyzes (in the absence of friction interfaces) or for non-linear dynamic analyzes (in the presence of friction interfaces such as bolted joints, flange joints, …).

Advantages

• Realistic forced response predictions of bladed disks with friction interfaces and structural mistuning effects;
• Efficient computation of nonlinear forced response levels in frequency domain, rather than time domain. Note that, frequency domain solution techniques are not available in commercial Finite Element (FE) software, and ad-hoc codes are needed.