Resonant fatigue testing of composite rotor blades

공진현상을 이용한 복합재 블레이드의 피로시험

Fatigue properties of composite materials are extremely important to design durable and reliable helicopter rotor blades. However, it is very difficult to apply conventional fatigue test loads in short period. Therefore, accelerating test speed and facilitating spectrum load realization are required. In this study, we have developed a fatigue testing method that uses a resonance of simply supported beam type blade specimen. This test consists in exciting the blade specimen with a frequency that corresponds to its natural frequency. In that case, the test specimen similar to a beam fixed between two pivot points starts vibrating and is significantly deformed. Resonant fatigue tests were performed by changing exciting vertical amplitude and frequency, and S-N curves of each composite materials were successfully obtained.