Abstract: | Accounting for fluid compressibility creates serious difficulties in solving the problem of oscillations of a grid of thin, slightly curved profiles in a subsonic stream. The problem has been solved in [1–3] for a widely-spaced cascade without stagger whose profiles oscillate in phase opposition. The phenomenon of aerodynamic (acoustic) resonance, which may arise in a grid in the direction transverse to the stream for definite values of the stream velocity and profile oscillation frequency, was discovered in [2]. An approximate solution of the problem in which account is not taken of the effect of the vortex trails on the gas flow has been obtained in [4]. In [5, 6] Meister studied in the exact linear formulation the problem of unsteady gas motion through an unstaggered cascade of semi-infinite plates. In [7] Meister considered a grid of profiles with finite chords, but the problem solution was not completed. The problem of subsonic gas flow through a staggered lattice whose profiles oscillate following a single law with constant phase shift was solved most completely in the studies of Kurzin [8, 9] using the method of integral equations. A method of solving the problem for the case of arbitrary harmonic oscillation laws for the lattice profiles was indicated in [10]. The results of the calculation of the unsteady aerodynamic forces for the particular case of a plate cascade without stagger are presented in [9,11], and the possibility of the occurrence of aerodynamic resonance in the cascade in the directions transverse to and along the stream is indicated.Another method of solving the problem is given in [12], in which the more general problem of unsteady subsonic gas flow through a three-dimensional cascade of plates is solved. In the present study this method is applied to the solution of the problem of oscillations of staggered plate cascades in a two-dimensional subsonic gas flow. The results are presented of an electronic computer calculation of the unsteady aerodynamic characteristics of the cascade profiles, which show the essential influence of fluid compressibility on these characteristics. In particular, a sharp decrease of the aerodynamic damping in the acoustic resonance regimes is obtained. |