Monitoring of Blade Vibrations and Tip Clearance at Non-Metallic Rotors in Turbo Machines

Author(s):  
Florian Dreier ◽  
Thorsten Pfister ◽  
Jürgen Czarske

In order to improve the safety, the lifetime and the energy efficiency of turbo machines, the dynamic behaviour of the rotor has to be analysed and optimized. Thus, rotor unbalances, dynamic deformations and blade vibrations as well as blade tip clearance changes have to be monitored during operation to optimize the rotor design and to validate numerical models. However, these are great challenges for metrology, since small, robust and non-contact measurement techniques are required offering both micrometer accuracy and microsecond temporal resolution which is not fulfilled with currently available measurement techniques. To solve this problem, we present in this contribution a miniaturized fiberoptic laser Doppler probe that measures simultaneously the in-plane velocity and the out-of-plane position of laterally moving objects. Experiments have been carried out demonstrating the capability of this sensor to measure engine order blade vibrations instantaneously. Assuming a single engine order and a known vibration frequency, only one laser Doppler probe is necessary to measure the vibration amplitude. Thus, in contrast to blade tip timing, only one optical access to the blade tip is sufficient to measure the vibration amplitude. Furthermore, the novel sensor performs even at composite materials such as strongly absorbing carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) which became more popular in rotors of turbo machines.

Author(s):  
Thorsten Pfister ◽  
Philipp Günther ◽  
Florian Dreier ◽  
Jürgen Czarske

Monitoring rotor deformations and vibrations dynamically is an important task for improving both the safety and the lifetime as well as the energy efficiency of motors and turbo machines. However, due to the high rotor speed encountered in particular at turbo machines, this requires concurrently high measurement rate and high accuracy, which is hardly possible to achieve with currently available measurement techniques. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a novel nonincremental interferometric optical sensor that measures simultaneously the in-plane velocity and the out-of-plane position of laterally moving objects with micrometer precision and concurrently with microsecond temporal resolution. It will be shown that this sensor exhibits the outstanding feature that its measurement uncertainty is generally independent of the object velocity, which enables precise deformation and vibration measurements also at high rotor speed. Moreover, this sensor does not require an in situ calibration and it allows a direct measurement of blade velocity variations in contrast to blade tip timing systems. For application under harsh environmental conditions such as high temperatures, a robust and miniaturized fiber-optic sensor setup was developed. To demonstrate the capability of this sensor, measurements of tip clearance changes and rotor blade vibrations at varying operating conditions of a transonic centrifugal compressor test rig at blade tip velocities up to 600 m/s are presented among others.


Author(s):  
Thorsten Pfister ◽  
Philipp Gu¨nther ◽  
Florian Dreier ◽  
Ju¨rgen Czarske

Monitoring rotor deformations and vibrations dynamically is an important task for improving both the safety and the lifetime as well as the energy efficiency of motors and turbo machines. However, due to the high rotor speed encountered in particular at turbo machines, this requires concurrently high measurement rate and high accuracy, which is hardly possible to achieve with currently available measurement techniques. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a novel non-incremental interferometric optical sensor that measures simultaneously the in-plane velocity and the out-of-plane position of laterally moving objects with micrometer precision and concurrently with microsecond temporal resolution. It will be shown that this sensor exhibits the outstanding feature that its measurement uncertainty is generally independent of the object velocity, which enables precise deformation and vibration measurements also at high rotor speed. Moreover, this sensor does not require an in situ calibration and it allows a direct measurement of blade velocity variations in contrast to BTT systems. For application under harsh environmental conditions such as high temperatures, a robust and miniaturized fiber-optic sensor setup was developed. To demonstrate the capability of this sensor, measurements of tip clearance changes and rotor blade vibrations at varying operating conditions of a transonic centrifugal compressor test rig at blade tip velocities up to 600 m/s are presented amongst others.


Author(s):  
Lamyaa A. El-Gabry

A computational study has been performed to predict the heat transfer distribution on the blade tip surface for a representative gas turbine first stage blade. CFD predictions of blade tip heat transfer are compared to test measurements taken in a linear cascade, when available. The blade geometry has an inlet Mach number of 0.3 and an exit Mach number of 0.75, pressure ratio of 1.5, exit Reynolds number based on axial chord of 2.57×106, and total turning of 110 deg. Three blade tip configurations were considered; they are flat tip, a full perimeter squealer, and an offset squealer where the rim is offset to the interior of the tip perimeter. These three tip geometries were modeled at three tip clearances of 1.25, 2.0, and 2.75% of blade span. The tip heat transfer results of the numerical models agree fairly well with the data and are comparable to other CFD predictions in the open literature.


Author(s):  
Lamyaa A. El-Gabry

A computational study has been performed to predict the heat transfer distribution on the blade tip surface for a representative gas turbine first stage blade. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions of blade tip heat transfer are compared with test measurements taken in a linear cascade, when available. The blade geometry has an inlet Mach number of 0.3 and an exit Mach number of 0.75, pressure ratio of 1.5, exit Reynolds number based on axial chord of 2.57×106, and total turning of 110 deg. Three blade tip configurations were considered; a flat tip, a full perimeter squealer, and an offset squealer where the rim is offset to the interior of the tip perimeter. These three tip geometries were modeled at three tip clearances of 1.25%, 2.0%, and 2.75% of the blade span. The tip heat transfer results of the numerical models agree well with data. For the case in which side-by-side comparison with test measurements in the open literature is possible, the magnitude of the heat transfer coefficient in the “sweet spot” matches data exactly and shows 20–50% better agreement with experiment than prior CFD predictions of this same case.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. G. Sheard

This paper describes a capacitance-based tip clearance measurement system which engineers have used in the most demanding turbine test applications. The capacitance probe has survived extended use in a major European gas turbine manufacturer's high-temperature demonstrator unit, where it functioned reliably at a turbine entry temperature in excess of 1800 degrees Kelvin. This paper explores blade by blade tip clearance measurement techniques and examines probe performance under laboratory conditions in support of high-temperature installations. The paper outlines the blade by blade tip clearance measurement technique and describes the experimental facility used to study tip clearance measurement. The paper also fully describes the method used to calibrate the measurement system in order to ascertain measurement accuracy. The paper clarifies how the practical problems were overcome associated with making blade by blade tip clearance measurements in both compressor and turbine environments. Since its initial development, gas turbine development programmes have routinely used the clearance measurement system. The inherent robustness of the system has resulted in reliable in-service measurement of clearance in real world applications.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Liang Zhang ◽  
Qidi Wang ◽  
Xin Li

Blade tip timing (BTT) technology is the most effective means for real-time monitoring of blade vibration. Accurately extracting the time of blade tip reaching the sensors is the key to ensure the accuracy of the BTT system. The tip clearance changes due to various complex forces during high-speed rotation. The traditional BTT signal extraction method does not consider the influence of tip clearance change on timing accuracy and introduces large timing errors. To solve this problem, a quadratic curve fitting timing method was proposed. In addition, based on the measurement principle of the eddy current sensors, the relationship among the output voltage of the eddy current sensor, tip clearance, and the blade cutting magnetic line angle was calibrated. A multisensor vibration parameter identification algorithm based on arbitrary angular distribution was introduced. Finally, the experiments were conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that in the range of 0.4 to 1.05 mm tip clearance change, the maximum absolute error of the timing values calculated by the proposed method is 26.0359 us, which is much lower than the calculated error of 203.7459 us when using the traditional timing method. When the tip clearance changed, the constant speed synchronous vibration parameters of No. 0 blade were identified. The average value of the vibration amplitude is 1.0881 mm. Compared with the identification results without changing tip clearance, the average value error of the vibration amplitude is 0.0017 mm. It is proved that within the blade tip clearance variation of 0.4 to 0.9 mm, the timing values obtained by the proposed timing method can accurately identify the vibration parameters of the blade.


Author(s):  
Jack David Stubbs ◽  
Muhammad Arslan Shahid

Abstract As turbomachinery OEMs focus efforts to further increase reliability, power and efficiencies, the running clearance between blade tips and stator continue to be of the utmost importance. This paper investigates the capability of capacitive tip clearance systems to perform individual blade tip clearance measurements on high speed rotors of up to 90,000rpm. A rotor was designed using finite element analysis; unique blade responses have been predicted. The objective of this investigation was to consider two different approaches to the application of blade tip clearance measurements and the system requirements to accurately measure low levels of radial displacement of a target rotating between 1,000rpm and 90,000rpm. The first uses the standard approach with passive probes and the second, a new technique using active probes that have demonstrated bandwidths of 1.2MHz and increased measuring range with a lower level of measurement uncertainty. Both systems’ approaches are compared, and their capabilities are evaluated for high-speed applications. The higher bandwidth capabilities of the latter system, combined with smaller sensor diameters, produces comparable signal rise times to the optical systems used in blade tip timing measurements. The difference in approach offers the potential of contamination resistant sensors for long term blade tip timing applications and measurement probes that do not require cooling systems to withstand higher temperature applications. The use of different probe configurations, in a number of applications, has demonstrated a two-fold improvement in the measurement range whilst producing lower levels of noise and uncertainty when applied to blade targets made from composites, aluminium and nickel-alloy materials. The measurement data presented includes individual blade’s radial displacement, identified shaft axial displacement, effects of resonance in the test system and the identification of the main drivers of measurement uncertainty along with an achievable value. The capacitive measurement systems’ performance for blade tip clearance is analysed and reported. The capability to perform other measurement techniques such as blade tip timing with a dual use measurement probe is also analysed and reported. This is done by correlating measurement results between the capacitive systems with that of a repeat measurement of the same target using an optical BTT system.


Materials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun-Yi Zhang ◽  
Jing-Shan Wei ◽  
Ze Wang ◽  
Zhe-Shan Yuan ◽  
Cheng-Wei Fei ◽  
...  

To reveal the effect of high-temperature creep on the blade-tip radial running clearance of aeroengine high-pressure turbines, a distributed collaborative generalized regression extremum neural network is proposed by absorbing the heuristic thoughts of distributed collaborative response surface method and the generalized extremum neural network, in order to improve the reliability analysis of blade-tip clearance with creep behavior in terms of modeling precision and simulation efficiency. In this method, the generalized extremum neural network was used to handle the transients by simplifying the response process as one extremum and to address the strong nonlinearity by means of its nonlinear mapping ability. The distributed collaborative response surface method was applied to handle multi-object multi-discipline analysis, by decomposing one “big” model with hyperparameters and high nonlinearity into a series of “small” sub-models with few parameters and low nonlinearity. Based on the developed method, the blade-tip clearance reliability analysis of an aeroengine high-pressure turbine was performed subject to the creep behaviors of structural materials, by considering the randomness of influencing parameters such as gas temperature, rotational speed, material parameters, convective heat transfer coefficient, and so forth. It was found that the reliability degree of the clearance is 0.9909 when the allowable value is 2.2 mm, and the creep deformation of the clearance presents a normal distribution with a mean of 1.9829 mm and a standard deviation of 0.07539 mm. Based on a comparison of the methods, it is demonstrated that the proposed method requires a computing time of 1.201 s and has a computational accuracy of 99.929% over 104 simulations, which are improvements of 70.5% and 1.23%, respectively, relative to the distributed collaborative response surface method. Meanwhile, the high efficiency and high precision of the presented approach become more obvious with the increasing simulations. The efforts of this study provide a promising approach to improve the dynamic reliability analysis of complex structures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-100
Author(s):  
Philip Poillot ◽  
Christine L. Le Maitre ◽  
Jacques M. Huyghe

AbstractThe strain-generated potential (SGP) is a well-established mechanism in cartilaginous tissues whereby mechanical forces generate electrical potentials. In articular cartilage (AC) and the intervertebral disc (IVD), studies on the SGP have focused on fluid- and ionic-driven effects, namely Donnan, diffusion and streaming potentials. However, recent evidence has indicated a direct coupling between strain and electrical potential. Piezoelectricity is one such mechanism whereby deformation of most biological structures, like collagen, can directly generate an electrical potential. In this review, the SGP in AC and the IVD will be revisited in light of piezoelectricity and mechanotransduction. While the evidence base for physiologically significant piezoelectric responses in tissue is lacking, difficulties in quantifying the physiological response and imperfect measurement techniques may have underestimated the property. Hindering our understanding of the SGP further, numerical models to-date have negated ferroelectric effects in the SGP and have utilised classic Donnan theory that, as evidence argues, may be oversimplified. Moreover, changes in the SGP with degeneration due to an altered extracellular matrix (ECM) indicate that the significance of ionic-driven mechanisms may diminish relative to the piezoelectric response. The SGP, and these mechanisms behind it, are finally discussed in relation to the cell response.


Author(s):  
Weijie Wang ◽  
Shaopeng Lu ◽  
Hongmei Jiang ◽  
Qiusheng Deng ◽  
Jinfang Teng ◽  
...  

Numerical simulations are conducted to present the aerothermal performance of a turbine blade tip with cutback squealer rim. Two different tip clearance heights (0.5%, 1.0% of the blade span) and three different cavity depths (2.0%, 3.0%, and 6.0% of the blade span) are investigated. The results show that a high heat transfer coefficient (HTC) strip on the cavity floor appears near the suction side. It extends with the increase of tip clearance height and moves towards the suction side with the increase of cavity depth. The cutback region near the trailing edge has a high HTC value due to the flush of over-tip leakage flow. High HTC region shrinks to the trailing edge with the increase of cavity depth since there is more accumulated flow in the cavity for larger cavity depth. For small tip clearance cases, high HTC distribution appears on the pressure side rim. However, high HTC distribution is observed on suction side rim for large tip clearance height. This is mainly caused by the flow separation and reattachment on the squealer rims.


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