FEM BASED MODEL TO STUDY HCF IN SIMPLIFIED TURBINE BLADES

Rakesh Patel, Anthony Palazotto

ABSTRACT

Turbine blades are very critical components of an aircraft engine. Malfunctioning of turbine blades can cause costly maintenance and downtime, even loss of life in extreme cases. High Cycle Fatigue is one of the prime reasons of turbine blade failures, thus understanding and prediction of fatigue failure is very critical. This paper is aimed at studying the cyclic stresses arising in a turbine blade using the finite element method. The paper presents a method that is laboratory oriented and characterizes the aerodynamic and centrifugal loading, which are prime loads on a turbine blade. A location and magnitude of an equivalent concentrated force, which represents an equivalent distributed load is evaluated. Such an equivalent load can be used to replicate the effects of aerodynamic load and centrifugal force in a static laboratory experiment. The analytical findings are showed to compare favorably with experimental results.