Optimal Placement of Piezoelectric Plates for Active Vibration Control of Gas Turbine Blades: Experimental Results

It is well known that the gas turbine blade vibrations can give rise to catastrophic failures and a reduction of the blades life because of fatigue related phenomena. In last two decades, the adoption of piezoelectric elements, has received considerable attention by many researcher for its potential applicability to different areas of mechanical, aerospace, aeronautical and civil engineering. Recently, a number of studies of blades vibration control via piezoelectric plates and patches have been reported. It was reported that the use of piezoelectric elements can be very effective in actively controlling vibrations. In one of their previous contributions, the authors of the present manuscript studied a model to control the blade vibrations by piezoelectric elements and validated their results using a multi-physics finite elements package (COMSOL) and results from the literature. An optimal placement method of piezoelectric plate has been developed and applied to different loading scenarios for realistic configurations encountered in gas turbine blades. It has been demonstrated that the optimal placement depends on the spectrum of the load, so that segmented piezoelectric patches have been considered and, for different loads, an optimal combination of sequential and/or parallel actuation and control of the segments has been studied. In this paper, an experimental investigation carried out by the authors using a simplified beam configuration is reported and discussed. The test results obtained by the investigators are then compared with the numerical predictions .