Life Prediction of Thermal Barrier Coated C3X Gas Turbine Blade of CMSX-4 Material

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajmit Kumar ◽  
Sanket Kumar ◽  
K. N. Pandey

Abstract The drive to higher efficient gas turbine engines and improved performance is attained by increasing turbine inlet temperature. This lead to the use of advanced material, multi-layered thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) and effective cooling technique in a gas turbine blade system. The main objective is to predict and compare the life between an uncoated blade developed by NASA named C3X and a tri-layered thermal barrier coated C3X blade working under four different high temperature operating conditions. The geometry of the uncoated blade was modelled using Catia software. Three layers of coatings i.e., top coat, bond coat and thermally grown oxide with suitable thickness were generated by the mesh offset technique which was applied to an uncoated blade to model the coated blade. Thereafter steady-state 3D conjugate heat transfer analysis (CFD) with k-ε turbulence model by Ansys Cfx was performed to obtain temperature, pressure and heat transfer coefficient distribution on the surface of the blade. Firstly, this CFD analysis was performed using stainless steel as substrate material, then validated with experimental values and lastly, the same simulation model was applied to Nickel based super-alloy CMSX-4 material. The next step was carrying out transient uncoupled heat transfer, thermal stress, mechanical stress and sequentially coupled thermo-mechanical stress analyses using Abaqus for a flight length of 5000 seconds. At last, the creep-fatigue interaction life of the blade was computed by ductility exhaustion concept with morrow mean stress correction method using Fesafe/Turbolife software. After carrying out above mentioned processes for both uncoated and coated blade, an effective comparison was made. A significant decrease in Temperature (up to 127 K) and Thermo-Mechanical Stress (up to 263 MPa) and a significant increase in Fatigue-Creep Life (up to 16.5 times) was observed when TBCs were applied. The result shows that the thermal load was more severe than the mechanical load. The maximum thermo-mechanical stress was found at the trailing edge and fixed portion of the blade.

Author(s):  
S. Kathiravan ◽  
Roberto De Prosperis ◽  
Alessandro Ciani

Due to recent advancements made in computational technology, CFD tools are capable of accurately capturing complex physical phenomenon. The proposed novel CFD methodology improves the prediction reliability and capability of Gas Turbine Blade heat transfer and secondary flow behaviour. This paper discusses a robust CFD based methodology to validate the complex gas turbine blade cooling design using detailed 3D flow & conjugate heat transfer analysis. Both primary and secondary flow domains along with blade metal are considered in one single integrated CFD model. This will capture the coupled heat transfer and tip vortices mixing effects and hence accurately predict the secondary cooling flow. The secondary flow path geometry consists of serpentine passages with turbulator features in the flow path to improve the effective heat transfer. Several sensitivity studies were performed using the above model to understand the impact of turbulator fillets, tip hole coating thickness, domain interface and suitably accounted for in the full scale simulation. The numerical simulation results were extensively validated with GE industrial Frame5 gas turbine prototype test thermocouple data and thermal profiles (span-wise) obtained from metallographic images. This novel method gives a thorough understanding of flow-thermal physics involved in serpentine cooling and helps to optimize effective cooling flow usage.


Author(s):  
Karsten Kusterer ◽  
Gang Lin ◽  
Dieter Bohn ◽  
Takao Sugimoto ◽  
Ryozo Tanaka ◽  
...  

The gas turbine blade leading edge area has locally extremely high thermal loads, which restrict the further increase of turbine inlet temperature or the decrease of the amount of coolant mass flow to improve the thermal efficiency. Jet impingement heat transfer is the state of the art cooling configuration, which has long been used in this area. In the present study, a modified double swirl chambers cooling configuration has been developed for the gas turbine blade leading edge. The double swirl chambers cooling (DSC) technology is introduced by the authors and comprises a significant enhancement of heat transfer due to the generation of two anti-rotating swirls. In DSC cooling the reattachment of the swirl flows with the maximum velocity at the middle of the chamber leads to a linear impingement effect, which is most suitable for the leading edge cooling for a gas turbine blade. In addition, because of the two swirls both suction side and pressure side of the blade near the leading edge can be very well cooled. In this work, a comparison among three different internal cooling configurations for the leading edge (impingement cooling, swirl chamber and double swirl chambers) has been investigated numerically. With the same inlet slots and the same Reynolds number based on hydraulic diameter of channel the DSC cooling shows overall higher Nusselt number ratio than that in the other two cooling configurations. Downstream of the impingement point, due to the linear impingement effect, the DSC cooling has twice the heat flux in the leading edge area than the standard impingement cooling channel.


Author(s):  
S. Esakki Muthu ◽  
S. Dileep ◽  
S. Saji Kumar ◽  
D. K. Girish

Life estimation of Directionally Solidified (DS) MARM-247 HPT gas turbine blade used in a turbofan engine of a supersonic aircraft is presented. These blades were drafted into the engine as a replacement for the polycrystal (NIMONIC) blades since a more efficient, reliable and durable material with high strength and temperature resistance was required to further enhance the life of the turbine blade and the efficiency of the power generation process. The supersonic aircraft is having a repeated mission cycle of a fast acceleration from idle, a 1hr cruise at Mach 1.5 and a fast deceleration to idle. The mission cycle which is a repetition of acceleration, cruise and deceleration cycles can produce wide variety of complex loading conditions which can result in HCF, LCF and creep damage of the turbine blade. Empirical equation of the universal slope developed by Manson was used to estimate the damage component due to LCF. The cumulative stresses and strains due to creep as a function of time was determined using Time hardening rule. Creep data for MARM-247 was correlated using LMP to predict the lives to 1% of creep strain at worst possible combination of temperature and stress value. Damage due to creep per mission cycle was determined using Life fraction Rule proposed by Robinson and Taira. The vibration characteristics of the turbine blade were predicted using Modal analysis. Campbell diagram was plotted to ascertain whether any nozzle passing frequency fall within the working range of the blade. Harmonic analysis was carried out to evaluate the magnitude of the alternating stresses resulting from the blade vibrations at resonance during the acceleration and deceleration cycle. HCF life of the turbine blade was assessed using Goodman diagram. The total damage of the turbine blade per mission cycle due to the above loading was assumed as the combination of the individual damage due to fatigue and creep. Time to failure under combined creep and fatigue damage was estimated using linear damage rule. Non linear features of FEA tool ANSYS12.0 was exploited to calculate the stress distribution, creep, plastic and the total strain encountered by the turbine blade as a function of mission cycle time. The loading spectrum associated with the mission cycle which includes the temperature, gas pressure and the speed profiles were obtained from a sophisticated engine ground test facility which was configured to simulate actual engine operating conditions. The proposed method of cyclic life estimation using FEM was validated by performing various component and engine level tests. A good agreement was observed between the calculated and observed blade lives.


Author(s):  
E. Findeisen ◽  
B. Woerz ◽  
M. Wieler ◽  
P. Jeschke ◽  
M. Rabs

This paper presents two different numerical methods to predict the thermal load of a convection-cooled gas-turbine blade under realistic operating temperature conditions. The subject of the investigation is a gas-turbine rotor blade equipped with an academic convection-cooling system and investigated at a cascade test-rig. It consists of three cooling channels, which are connected outside the blade, so allowing cooling air temperature measurements. Both methods use FE models to obtain the temperature distribution of the solid blade. The difference between these methods lies in the generation of the heat transfer coefficients along the cooling channel walls which serve as a boundary condition for the FE model. One method, referred to as the FEM1D method, uses empirical one-dimensional correlations known from the available literature. The other method, the FEM2D method, uses three-dimensional CFD simulations to obtain two-dimensional heat transfer coefficient distributions. The numerical results are compared to each other as well as to experimental data, so that the benefits and limitations of each method can be shown and validated. Overall, this paper provides an evaluation of the different methods which are used to predict temperature distributions in convection-cooled gas-turbines with regard to accuracy, numerical cost and the limitations of each method. The temperature profiles obtained in all methods generally show good agreement with the experiments. However, the more detailed methods produce more accurate results by causing higher numerical costs.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ion Ion ◽  
Anibal Portinha ◽  
Jorge Martins ◽  
Vasco Teixeira ◽  
Joaquim Carneiro

Zirconia stabilized with 8 wt.% Y2O3 is the most common material to be applied in thermal barrier coatings owing to its excellent properties: low thermal conductivity, high toughness and thermal expansion coefficient as ceramic material. Calculation has been made to evaluate the gains of thermal barrier coatings applied on gas turbine blades. The study considers a top ceramic coating Zirconia stabilized with 8 wt.% Y2O3 on a NiCoCrAlY bond coat and Inconel 738LC as substrate. For different thickness and different cooling air flow rates, a thermodynamic analysis has been performed and pollutants emissions (CO, NOx) have been estimated to analyze the effect of rising the gas inlet temperature. The effect of thickness and thermal conductivity of top coating and the mass flow rate of cooling air have been analyzed. The model for heat transfer analysis gives the temperature reduction through the wall blade for the considered conditions and the results presented in this contribution are restricted to a two considered limits: (1) maximum allowable temperature for top layer (1200?C) and (2) for blade material (1000?C). The model can be used to analyze other materials that support higher temperatures helping in the development of new materials for thermal barrier coatings.


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