COmposite Blade STRuctural ANalyzer (COBSTRAN, Glenn, 1989)

COBSTRAN was a preprocessor for NASTRAN, designed to generate finite element models of composite blades. While developed specifically

for advanced turboprop blades under the Advanced Turboprop (ATP) project, it was subsequently applied to compressor blades and tur­bine blades. It could be used with both COSMIC NASTRAN and MSC/ NASTRAN, and was subsequently extended to work as a preprocessor for the MARC nonlinear finite element code.[984]

1) BLAde SIMulation (BLASIM), 1992

BLASIM calculates dynamic characteristics of engine blades before and after an ice impact event. BLASIM could accept input geometry in the form of airfoil coordinates or as a NASTRAN-format finite ele­ment model. BLASIM could also utilize the ICAN program (discussed separately) to generate ply properties of composite blades.[985] "The ice impacts the leading edge of the blade causing severe local damage. The local structural response of the blade due to the ice impact is pre­dicted via a transient response analysis by modeling only a local patch around the impact region. After ice impact, the global geometry of the blade is updated using deformations of the local patch and a free vibra­tion analysis is performed. The effects of ice impact location, ice size and ice velocity on the blade mode shapes and natural frequencies are investigated.”[986]