Ring Segment Life Improvement Through Hook Gap and Stiffness Optimization

For large gas turbine new make or standard customer value program always aims for higher power and efficiency which calls for an incremental stage loading in terms of higher gas pressure and temperatures distributions for the new upgrade with less ownership costs. To bring down the ownership cost without compromising on the performance or operating hours it becomes important to squeeze and optimize the current design to its maximum limits. This leads to a situation where existing static components fails to meet the MI Strength and Lifing requirements due to change in pressure and temperature. This paper describes the design challenges and the applied mitigations in the design optimizations of aft stage Ring Segment Hooks and Rails to meet requirements for higher loads at higher performance. Several sensitivity studies were carried out and transfer functions were developed to bring down the hook loads and hook stresses for steady state max temperature and pressure conditions. Two strategies were adopted to optimize the hook loads. The first is to find the adequate gap between hook and slot and the other one is to vary the hook stiffness by changing the circumferential length. This paper also presents a systematic approach and check points to decide the optimum gaps and the stiffness of the hooks. For that purpose, a co-relation was developed between hook load and hook to slot gap and the hook circumferential length and hook stiffness.

Design rules for timber log reciprocal floors, based on mass optimization under stiffness constraint

Building with raw timber allows to reduce the price of construction and to make it more competitive with respect to concrete or steel construction. For a few years now, the combination of parametric design and robotic tools make possible the fast and precise milling of timber logs for their accurate connection. However, the spans are quickly limited by the logs length. In this context, reciprocal structures are relevant, since they allow to build large spans structures with short beams. Finally, the architectural interest of reciprocal structures is not to prove. However, the choice of the most efficient reciprocal frame, as well as its structural relevance in terms of mass and stiffness is, most of the time, ruled by subjective considerations. This paper focuses on rectangular floors composed of reciprocal moduli and has three objectives: (1) to develop a general mass and stiffness optimization method for reciprocal floors, which is not only necessary to limit the price, but also to reduce their thickness, (2) to define design rules for reciprocal floors, in particular for the choice of the best engagement ratio, and (3) to compare the structural efficiency of reciprocal floors with the one of “traditional” floors with parallel logs. Coming from a dimensionless transformation of the equilibrium equations, the results of this article will thus give the designers keys to better design reciprocal structures, evaluate their structural performances and relevance, and justify their choices.

A virtual joint method of analytical form for parallel manipulators

Oriented towards the stiffness optimization of parallel manipulators, a stiffness modeling method based on subspace analysis was proposed. The paper revealed the “shielding effect” of passive joints, i.e. shielding the partial local stiffness of a mechanism on Cartesian space, and accordingly brought forward the concept of Effective Stiffness Tensor (EST), which was then obtained by introducing the orthogonal projector. The method allows a stiffness model of analytical form as well as high computation efficiency, which makes it suitable for applications in the stiffness optimization of parallel manipulators. Proposed method had been applied to the parallel alignment mechanism in China’s large space telescope and verified by dynamic experiments.