The Study of Tip Clearance of a Wide-Chord Fan Blade of a High Bypass Ratio Turbo-Fan Engine

Author(s):  
Xianghai Chai ◽  
Pinlian Han ◽  
Tongcheng Shi ◽  
Zhiqiang Wang

The wide-chord swept fan blade (WCSFB) has been extensively used in a advanced high bypass ratio turbofan engines. This paper explores the nature of WCSFB tip clearance. From the static analysis, it is found that the tip radial clearance at leading and trailing edge of WCSFB will be reduced with either bending or torsional deformation of the blade. And the change of the tip radial clearances varies with the twist angle. In this study, dynamic response of the WCSFB with different angular accelerations of the engine has been analyzed. It shows that when the angular acceleration of the fan rotor reaches a certain level, considerable bending and torsional deformation of the blade will occur, accompanied by the reduction of the tip radial clearance, which may lead to abnormal rubbing/impact between the blade tip and the casing. This may cause severe consequence for the blade and casing of the engine. The numerical simulation results show that the rubbing/impact between the WCSFB tip and the casing under angular acceleration loads can lead to local buckling of the tip leading edge of the blade, which will cause severe damage at the blade tip. Moreover, the influence of vibration and mass imbalance of the rotor on the fan blade tip clearance is also analyzed. In this paper, the results of a rig test under irregular acceleration for the WCSFB rotor is also presented, which validates the analytical results. The numerical simulation and test results will assist the blade tip clearance design to reflect the nature of the WCSFB under irregular acceleration to ensure safety.

Author(s):  
Chao Yin ◽  
Jun Hu

The large axial fan’s outlet hub shape changes with its working environment. Usually for saving cost, the hub geometry of fan’s outlet section is roughly processed. There is no geometry specification for the outlet hub section, which makes its structure seriously mismatched with other parts. When a blade which has good performance is fitted into an actual production, it probably couldn’t get a desired result. This shows that the effect of outlet-hub geometry on the performance of large axial fan couldn’t be neglected. To study the effect, four cases of different outlet hub geometries of a large axial fan have been designed and investigated in current paper. Each case has been carefully calculated by using numerical simulation methods. By comparing their aerodynamic characteristics and analyzing flow structures in the tip and hub region of the fan blade, the results show that with the same blade tip clearance, the shape of hub geometry has little effect on the tip flow field. However, the fan efficiency is obviously affected by the hub shape. Straight hub could approve the total pressure of the fan, while shrink hub could reduce shaft power more efficiently. A kind of proper outlet hub geometry could greatly improve the flow performance in the hub region and increase the fan efficiency. So we could choose a proper shape of outlet hub for different working requirements.


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.


Author(s):  
Eric B. Holmquist ◽  
Peter L. Jalbert

New and future gas turbine engines are being required to provide greater thrust with improved efficiency, while simultaneously reducing life cycle operating costs. Improved component capabilities enable active control methods to provide better control of engine operation with reduced margin. One area of interest is a means to assess the relative position of rotating machinery in real-time, in particular hot section turbo machinery. To this end, Hamilton Sundstrand is working to develop a real-time means to monitor blade position relative to the engine static structure. This approach may yield other engine operating characteristics useful in assessing component health, specifically measuring blade tip clearance, time-of-arrival, and other parameters. UTC is leveraging its many years of experience with engine control systems to develop a microwave-based sensing device, applicable to both military and commercial engines. The presentation will discuss a hot section engine demonstration of a blade position monitoring system and the control system implications posed by a microwave-based solution. Considerations necessary to implement such a system and the challenges associated with integrating a microwave-based sensor system into an engine control system are discussed.


Author(s):  
Patrick H. Wagner ◽  
Jan Van herle ◽  
Lili Gu ◽  
Jürg Schiffmann

Abstract The blade tip clearance loss was studied experimentally and numerically for a micro radial fan with a tip diameter of 19.2mm. Its relative blade tip clearance, i.e., the clearance divided by the blade height of 1.82 mm, was adjusted with different shims. The fan characteristics were experimentally determined for an operation at the nominal rotational speed of 168 krpm with hot air (200 °C). The total-to-total pressure rise and efficiency increased from 49 mbar to 68 mbar and from 53% to 64%, respectively, by reducing the relative tip clearance from 7.7% to the design value of 2.2%. Single and full passage computational fluid dynamics simulations correlate well with these experimental findings. The widely-used Pfleiderer loss correlation with an empirical coefficient of 2.8 fits the numerical simulation and the experiments within +2 efficiency points. The high sensitivity to the tip clearance loss is a result of the design specific speed of 0.80, the highly-backward curved blades (17°), and possibly the low Reynolds number (1 × 105). The authors suggest three main measures to mitigate the blade tip clearance losses for small-scale fans: (1) utilization of high-precision surfaced-grooved gas-bearings to lower the blade tip clearance, (2) a mid-loaded blade design, and (3) an unloaded fan leading edge to reduce the blade tip clearance vortex in the fan passage.


Author(s):  
A. G. Sheard ◽  
B. Killeen

It is difficult to make a reliable measurement of running clearance in the hostile environment over the blading of a modern gas turbine. When engine manufacturers require the measurement to be made over every blade during live engine tests, system reliability, ruggedness and ease of operation are of primary importance. This paper describes a tip clearance measurement system that can measure clearance over every blade around a rotor. The measurement system concept is presented, and the system design described in detail. Commissioning of the measurement system on a compressor test facility, and the results obtained are discussed. An analysis of system performance during the commissioning trials concludes the paper.


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