Thin-Layer Magnetostrictive Composites for Fan Blade Damping

This proposed project will advance the capabilities of Fortis Technologies' patent-pending, magnetostrictive particulate composite dampers. These composites passively (a great advantage in simplicity and effectiveness over other recently developed active material dampers) provide damping through domain wall switching, a non-conservative action which provides a high loss factor (~ 0.40). These dampers can be easily fabricated into complex shapes, provide stiffness and strength while also incorporating novel damping capabilities which exceed in performance and temperature range viscoelastic materials, the current state of the art for damping. Currently, the magnetostrictive material used in these dampers is Terfenol-D, a rare-earth/iron alloy, which was originally developed for sonar applications. The hysteresis of the material is minimal by design. However, by altering the composition of the alloy, i.e. the ratio of rare-earth to iron, the size and activation stress of hysteresis in the material can be changed, increasing loss factors and effective stress ranges. Fortis Technologies proposes to use this new technology in thin-layers on turbomachinery components and measure the vibration mitigation effectiveness on a variety of turbomachinery components susceptible to high-cycle fatigue. We believe this economical process can easily be scaled up and commercially implemental for a variety of applications throughout a turbine engine