Fracture Mechanics Analysis of a Single Crystal Turbine Blade

Single crystal superalloy turbine blades exhibit anisotropic behaviors, and the stress at the fir-tree root often reaches the yield stress of the material when the turbine operates at the peak rotational speed and at the maximum temperature. The nonlinear behavior of the material character at these operating conditions poses a significant challenge to prediction of the blade behavior using the conventional linear elastic fracture mechanics approach. In this paper a fracture mechanics analysis was performed for a single crystal turbine blade using the J-integral concept. First of all, the elastic-perfectly plastic J-integral and CTOD was used to correlate with the fatigue crack growth rates obtained in a single crystal blade in [100] and [110] directions, with the [001] direction as the loading direction under typical service conditions. The weight function method was used to evaluate the stress intensity factor for a crack growing along the serration bottom of the blade fir-tree root under small-scale yielding conditions and the crack growth analysis was performed using the correlated fatigue crack growth data. In addition, crack growth simulations were also performed using the Zencrack software. The simulated crack growth profile was compared with the actual crack profile on the component.