Scaling Concept for Axial Turbine Stages With Loosely Assembled Friction Bolts: The Linear Dynamic Assessment

In the early 1980s, Siemens developed a last stage fast rotating condensation blading (SK) blade with strongly twisted and tapered profiles for industrial condensing steam turbines, which operate with variable speed under high steam mass flow and excessive condensing pressures. To suppress alternating stresses of the lowest blade resonances, conical friction bolts are loosely mounted at the upper parts of adjacent airfoils. Also, these bolts couple the rotating blades, since steam excitation is lower than the friction threshold force on the bolt contacts. These coupling and damping capabilities were proven experimentally for the smallest SK blade at the test rig of the real turbine. By considering the similar mechanical and aerodynamic characteristics based on the tested smallest airfoil, the entire SK-blade family has been scaled up for reliable utilization in more than 500 industrial turbines operating for diverse ranges of power and speed. A recent trend to very large compression units, like gas to liquids, acid terephtalic, or methanol plants, imposes a need for further enlargement of the SK-blade family and its friction bolt, whose mechanical properties have been proven experimentally for the smallest airfoil. In this paper, the mechanical capabilities of the smallest and large SK blades coupled by the bolts are verified by using the finite element (FE) method. The static analyses with friction sliding on airfoil interfaces and the linear dynamic behavior of tuned disk assemblies are considered. The FE mesh quality and the proper boundary conditions at the radial fork root are accomplished by getting good agreements between the computed and measured resonance frequencies of the large freestanding blade at standstill. The validated mesh refinement and root boundary conditions are used further in all numerical FE analyses. For the large SK-disk assembly under spin-pit conditions, the obtained FE results are in very good agreement with the experimental Campbell diagrams, which are measured with the three gauges that also identify the stick-slip and stuck bolt’s contact conditions. Concerning the gauge outputs and the FE steady-state blade resonances computed for the analytically determined air jet excitation, the experimental spin-pit results demonstrate that the bolts are mainly in stuck contact conditions. Only in very narrow frequency ranges around resonance peaks, microslips on the bolts occur due to the resonance amplification of blade vibrations. This is proven indirectly by comparison of the overall damping values evaluated from the blade resonances at standstill and in the spin pit. The described linear dynamic concept assesses properly static stresses and free vibrations of the scaled disk assembly with friction bolts. For the steam excitation, which generates dynamic contact reactions bigger than the friction threshold forces, the realistic blade responses need to be obtained from the blade simulation with friction (Szwedowicz, J., Secall-Wimmel, T., and Duenck-Kerst, P., 2007, “Damping Performance of Axial Turbine Stages With Loosely Assembled Friction Bolts; the Non-Linear Dynamic Assessment; Part II,” Proceedings of ASME Turbo Expo 2007, Montreal, Canada, May 14–17, ASME Paper No. GT2007-27506).