Potential Disturbance Interactions With a Single Igv in an F109 Turbofan Engine

A common cause of aircraft engine failure is the high cycle fatigue of engine blades and stators. One of the primary causes of these failures is due to blade row interactions, which cause an aerodynamic excitation to be resonant with a mechanical natural frequency. Traditionally, the primary source of such aerodynamic excitations has been practically limited to viscous wakes from upstream components. However, more advanced designs require that blade rows be very highly loaded and closely spaced. This results in aerodynamic excitation from potential fields of downstream engine components, in addition to the known wake excitations. An experimental investigation of the potential field from the fan of a Honeywell F109 turbofan engine has been completed. The investigation included velocity measurements upstream of the fan, addition of an airfoil shaped probe upstream of the fan on which surface pressure measurements were acquired, and measurement of the velocity in the interaction region between the probe and the fan. This investigation sought to characterize the response on the upstream probe due to the fan potential field and the interaction between a viscous wake and the potential field; as such, all test conditions were for subsonic fan speeds. The results from the collected data show that fan-induced potential disturbances propagate upstream at acoustic velocities, to produce vane surface-pressure amplitudes as high as $40$ percent of the inlet, mean total pressure. Further, these fan-induced pressure amplitudes display large variations between the two vane surfaces. An argument is made that the structure of the pressure response is consistent with the presence of two distinct sources of unsteady forcing disturbances. The disturbances on the incoming-rotation-facing surface of the IGV propagated upstream at a different speed than those on the outgoing-rotation-facing surface, indicating that one originated from a rotating source and the other from a stationary source. An argument is made to suggest that the stationary source is due to the rotor blades cutting through the wake of the IGV.