Failures of turbine blades are identified as the leading causes of unplanned outages for steam turbine. Accidents of low-pressure turbine blade occupied more than 70 percent in turbine components. Therefore, the prevention of failures for low pressure turbine blades is certainly needed. The procedure is illustrated by the case study. This procedure is used to guide, and support the plant manager's decisions to avoid a costly, unplanned outage. In this study, we are trying to find factors of failures in LP turbine blade and to make three steps to approach the solution of blade failure. First step is to measure natural frequency in mockup test and to compare it with nozzle passing frequency. Second step is to use FEM and to calculate the natural frequencies of 7 blades and 10 blades per group in BLADE code. Third step is to find natural frequencies of grouped blade off the nozzle passing frequency.

Date Published: 29 May 2002
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 4537, Third International Conference on Experimental Mechanics, (29 May 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.468824

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4537:
Third International Conference on Experimental Mechanics
Xiaoping Wu; Yuwen Qin; Jing Fang; Jingtang Ke, Editor(s)