Computer-Aided Engineering in the Design of an Experimental Blade Cascade for Fluid-Structure Interaction Studies

This paper summarises the importance of experimental studies of fluid-structure interaction in blade cascades with 3D flow. Such an experiment is currently being designed at the Institute of Thermomechanics of the CAS and must be carefully designed to meet the desired specifications. The use of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is now desirable in the design phase. The experiment is modelled in Computer Aided Design (CAD) software Autodesk Inventor and Finite Element Method (FEM) calculations in Ansys Workbench are used to test critical parts of the design. The use of these tools to design a composite blade with a high stiffness to weight ratio is demonstrated here in detail.