Dynamics simulations of fretting wear for aero-engine applications

A typical aircraft engine has many assemblies made up of thousands of contacts, such as blade tip shrouds and blade root joints. These contacts are employed to provide friction damping and vibration amplitude reduction at resonances. Contacts between components are a significant source of non-linearity due to the slip, stick and separation behavior during operation, which affect the structural response and the global dynamics of the engine. The tangential slip occurring at the interfaces leads to contact hysteresis and energy dissipation, thereby causing wear, which alters the contact behavior and change the dynamics. . In particular, the aim of this study is to numerically predict of such contact parameters evolution during the wear process comparing the numerical results with the experimental one in order to validate the numerical models used to perform the analysis .