Relationship between the pressure at the casing wall and at the blade tip for a vibrating turbine blade

A recent research program has identified the possibility of using the analysis of casing wall pressures in the indirect measurement of gas turbine rotor blade vibration amplitudes [1]. Analytical modelling of the casing wall pressures and reconstruction of rotor blade vibration amplitudes from the analysis of these simulated pressure signals have shown potential advantages over current non-contact rotor blade vibration measurement methods. However, the modelling made some fundamental assumptions about the casing wall pressure. One of the assumptions made was that the pressure at the blade tip is not significantly different from that measured across the clearance gap at the casing wall. This fluid-structure hypothesis is investigated in this paper. Unsteady computational fluid dynamic modelling of the flow conditions around the blade surface, combined with the blade structural motion, is performed numerically, and the distributions of the pressure across the rotor blade tip and casing clearance gap are investigated and reported

Computational Fluid Dynamic Analysis of a Vibrating Turbine Blade

This study presents the numerical fluid-structure interaction (FSI) modelling of a vibrating turbine blade using the commercial software ANSYS-12.1. The study has two major aims: (i) discussion of the current state of the art of modelling FSI in gas turbine engines and (ii) development of a “tuned” one-way FSI model of a vibrating turbine blade to investigate the correlation between the pressure at the turbine casing surface and the vibrating blade motion. Firstly, the feasibility of the complete FSI coupled two-way, three-dimensional modelling of a turbine blade undergoing vibration using current commercial software is discussed. Various modelling simplifications, which reduce the full coupling between the fluid and structural domains, are then presented. The one-way FSI model of the vibrating turbine blade is introduced, which has the computational efficiency of a moving boundary CFD model. This one-way FSI model includes the corrected motion of the vibrating turbine blade under given engine flow conditions. This one-way FSI model is used to interrogate the pressure around a vibrating gas turbine blade. The results obtained show that the pressure distribution at the casing surface does not differ significantly, in its general form, from the pressure at the vibrating rotor blade tip

Fluid-structure interaction study of gas turbine blade vibrations

A recent research program has identified the possibility of using the analysis of casing wall pressures in the direct measurement of gas turbine rotor blade vibration amplitudes.Currently the dominant method of non-contact measurement of gas turbine blade vibrations employs the use of a number of proximity probes located around the engine periphery measuring the blade tip (arrival) time (BTT). Despite the increasing ability of this method there still exist some limitations, viz: the requirement of a large number of sensors for each engine stage, sensitivity to sensor location, difficulties in dealing with multiple excitation frequencies and sensors being located in the gas path. Analytical modelling of the casing wall pressures and reconstruction of rotor blade vibration amplitudes from the analysis of these simulated pressure signals has shown significant improvement over current non-contact rotor blade vibration measurement limitations by requiring only a limited number of sensors and providing robust rotor blade vibration amplitude estimates in the presence of simulated measurement noise. However, this modelling was conducted with some fundamental assumptions about the casing wall pressures being made. One of these assumptions presumed that during blade motion the pressure profile around the rotor blades follows the blade?s motion while it oscillates around its equilibrium position. This assumption is investigated in this paper through the numerical modelling of the fully coupled two-way rotor blade motion and fluid pressure interaction