Emerging Advanced Technologies to Assess Reliability of Industrial Steam Turbine Blade Design

Abstract

New industrial processes sometimes require equipment that either has not yet been applied to the new use or even a completely new design. In some situations, established design criteria that have resulted in reliable equipment in past years may no longer be adequate. Therefore, one needs to turn to new technologies that have been developed by researchers. This presentation will review that state of promising technologies that may be or have recently been applies in estimating the reliability of steam turbine blades. Specifically, the discussion will detail the currently applied design tools including topics such as bladed disk vibration, mistuning of bladed disks, computation fluid dynamics (CFD) and the damping concept. An assessment of the useful life of a blade will be calculated for the high cycle fatigue under load. However, it should be realized that there would always be uncertainty associated with any design decision. Therefore, a probabilistic concept will be discussed and employed to quantify the risk of the proposed design as a means to more accurately evaluate this life. Examples will be employed to demonstrate the technology.