Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of blade deformation, caused by manufacturing inaccuracies, on the performance of a 2-stage axial steam turbine. A high fidelity 3D coordinate Measurement Machine has been employed to obtain the exact geometrical model of the blades. A Streamline Curvature solver was used to predict the overall performance of the turbine. During the manufacturing process of the casts and of the blades themselves, several types of errors can occur which lead to a different geometry from that envisaged by the designer. The main objective of this study is to investigate the effect of those errors on the performance of a 2-stage experimental axial steam turbine. A high fidelity measurement of the actual geometry of both stator and rotor blades has been carried out, using a 3D Coordinate Measurement Machine. The cross sections of the blades obtained by the measurement were compared with those produced by the design process to evaluate the change in blade inlet/exit angles. In addition, the geometrical deviations from the initial design have been subjected to a statistical study in order to locate the nature of the error. The actual (measured) model has been used as input into a Streamline Curvature solver to evaluate its performance. Finally, a comparison with the performance plots of the original geometry has been carried out. A measurable change of efficiency as well as in the total power delivered by the turbine was found. This suggests that the accumulated error caused during the manufacturing procedure plays a significant role in the overall performance of the machine by making it less efficient by more than 1%. Reverse engineering techniques can be applied to predict and alleviate these errors leading thereby to a final design of each stage with improved performance.
