Gas Turbine Casing Response to Blade Vibrations: Analytical and Experimental results

Abstract

The non-intrusive measurement of blade condition within a gas turbine would be a significant aid in the maintenance and continued operation of these engines. Online condition monitoring of the blade health by non-contact measurement methods is obviously the ambition of most techniques, with a number of methods proposed, investigated and employed for such measurement. The current dominant method uses proximity probes to measure blade arrival time for subsequent processing. It has been recently proposed however, that measurement of the turbine casing vibration response could provide a means of blade condition monitoring. The casing vibration is believed to be excited pre-dominantly by (i) the moving pressure waveform around each blade throughout its motion and (ii) the moments applied by the stationary stator blades. Any changes to the pressure profile around the rotating blades, due to their vibration, will therefore in turn affect these excitation forces. Previous work has introduced an analytical model of a gas turbine casing, and simulated pressure signal associated with the rotating blades. The model has been extended in this paper to more closely represent a commercial gas turbine with experimental verification being presented for various aspects of the analytical modelling procedure.