Cavitation instabilities in turbo-machinery such as cavitation surge and rotating cavitation are usually explained by the quasi-steady characteristics of cavitation, mass flow gain factor and cavitation compliance. However, there are certain cases when it is required to take account of unsteady characteristics. As an example of such cases, cavitation surge in industrial centrifugal pump caused by backflow vortex cavitation is presented and the importance of the phase delay of backflow vortex cavitation is clarified. First, fundamental characteristics of backflow vortex structure is shown followed by detailed discussions on the energy transfer under cavitation surge in the centrifugal pump. Then, the dynamics of backflow is discussed to explain a large phase lag observed in the experiments with the centrifugal pump.

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Machine fault diagnostic and prognostic techniques have been the considerable subjects of condition-based maintenance system in the recent time due to the potential advantages that could be gained from reducing downtime, decreasing maintenance costs, and increasing machine availability. For the past few years, research on machine fault diagnosis and prognosis has been developing rapidly. These publications covered in the wide range of statistical approaches to model-based approaches. With the aim of synthesizing and providing the information of these researches for researcher's community, this paper attempts to summarize and classify the recent published techniques in diagnosis and prognosis of rotating machinery. Furthermore, it also discusses the opportunities as well as the challenges for conducting advance research in the field of machine prognosis.

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Surrogate modeling is applied to a compressor blade shape optimization to modify its stacking line and thickness to enhance adiabatic efficiency and total pressure ratio. Six design variables are defined by parametric curves and three objectives; efficiency, total pressure and a combined objective of efficiency and total pressure are considered to enhance the performance of compressor blade. Latin hypercube sampling of design of experiments is used to generate 55 designs within design space constituted by the lower and upper limits of variables. Optimum designs are found by formulating a PRESS (predicted error sum of squares) based averaging (PBA) surrogate model with the help of a gradient based optimization algorithm. The optimum designs using the current variables show that, to optimize the performance of turbomachinery blade, the adiabatic efficiency objective is improved substantially while total pressure ratio objective is increased a very small amount. The multi-objective optimization shows that the efficiency can be increased with the less compensation of total pressure reduction or both objectives can be increased simultaneously.

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The effects of positively bowed blade on the aerodynamic performance of annular compressor cascades with large camber angle were experimentally investigated under different incidences. The distributions of the exit total pressure loss and secondary flow vectors of compressor cascades were analyzed. The static pressure was measured by tapping on the cascade surfaces, and the ink-trace flow visualizations were conducted. The results show that the value of the optimum bowed angle and optimum bowed height decrease because of the increased losses at the mid-span with the increase of the caber angle. The C-shape static pressure distribution along the radial direction exists on the suction surface of the straight cascade with large r camber angles. When bowed blade is applied, the larger bowed angle and larger bowed height will further enhance the accumulation of the low-energy fluid at the mid-span, thus deteriorate the flow behavior. Under 60° camber angle, flow behavior near the end-wall region of some bowed cascades even deteriorates instead of improving because the blockage of the separated flow near the mid-span keeps the low-energy fluid near the end-walls from moving towards the mid-span region, and as a result, a rapid augmentation of the total loss is easy to take place under large bowed angle. With the increase of camber angle, the choice range of bowed angle corresponding to the best performance in different incidences become narrower.

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Slurry wear with sand particles in rivers is a serious problem for pump operation. Therefore, a technique to predict wear volume loss is required for selecting wear resistant materials and determining specifications for the maintenance period. This paper reports a method for predicting the wear depth distribution on the blade of an impeller. Slurry wear tests of an aluminum pump impeller were conducted. Prediction results of wear depth distribution approximately correspond with the results of slurry wear tests. This technique is useful for industrial application.

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The flow instability in a low specific speed mixed-flow pump, having a positive slope of head-flow characteristics was investigated. Based on the static pressure measurements, it was found that a rotating stall in the vaned diffuser occurs at about 65% flow rate of best efficiency point (BEP). A dynamic Particle Image Velocimetry (DPIV) measurement and the numerical simulations were conducted in order to investigate the flow fields. As a result, the diffuser rotating stall was simulated even by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and the calculated periodic flow patterns agree well with the measured ones by DPIV. It is clarified that a periodical large scaled backflow, generated at the leading edge of the suction surface of the diffuser vane, causes the instability. Furthermore, the growth of the strong vortex at the leading edge of the diffuser vane induces the strong backflow from the diffuser outlet to the inlet. The scale of one stall cell is covered over four-passages in total thirteen vane-passages.

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The present study investigated temperature and thermal stress distributions in a film cooling system with normal injection cooling flow. 3D-numerical simulations using the FEM commercial code ANSYS were conducted to calculate distributions of temperature and thermal stresses. In the simulations, the surface boundary conditions used the surface heat transfer coefficients and adiabatic wall temperature which were converted from the Sherwood numbers and impermeable wall effectiveness obtained from previous mass transfer experiments. As a result, the temperature gradients, in contrast to the adiabatic wall temperature, were generated by conduction between the hot and cold regions in the film cooling system. The gradient magnitudes were about 10˜20K in the y-axis (spanwise) direction and about 50˜60K in the x-axis (streamwise) direction. The high thermal stresses resulting from this temperature distribution appeared in the side regions of holes. These locations were similar to those of thermal cracks in actual gas turbines. Thus, this thermal analysis can apply to a thermal design of film cooling holes to prevent or reduce thermal stresses.

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The effect of symmetric and asymmetric micro regenerative pump impellers on their pressure performance was studied. The shut off head of the pump with the symmetric impeller was about 2.5 times as that with the asymmetric impeller. The computation of the internal flow was performed to clarify the cause of the increase of the head. It was found that the contribution of the angular momentum supply was larger than that of shear stress for the head development in both cases. The larger head and momentum supply in the case of the symmetric impeller were caused by larger recirculated flow rate and larger angular momentum difference between the inlet and outlet to the impeller. The larger recirculated flow rate was caused by smaller pressure gradient in the direction of recirculated flow. The decrease of the circumferential velocity in the casing was attributed to the smaller local flow rate in the casing.

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In this study, a prediction theory for specific noise that is the overall characteristic of the fan has been proposed. This theory is based on total pressure prediction and broadband noise prediction. The specific noises of two forward curved fans with different number of blades were predicted. The flow around the impeller having 120 blades (MF120) was more biased at a certain positions than the impeller with 40 blades (MF40). An effective domain of the energy conversion of MF40 has extended overall than MF120. The total pressure was affected by the slip factor and pressure loss caused by the vortex flow. The suppression of a major pressure drop by the vortex flow and expansion of the effective domain for energy conversion contributed to an increase in the total pressure of MF40 at the design point. The position of maximum relative velocity was different for each fan. The relative velocity of MF120 was less than that of MF40 due to the deviation angle. The specific noise of MF120 was 2.7 dB less than that of MF40 due to the difference in internal flow. It has been quantitatively estimated that the deceleration in the relative velocity contributed to the improvement in the overall performance.

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The purpose of this paper is to gain a greater understanding of the performance of practical wind turbine generating systems with differing output power controllers and controlling means for wind turbine speed. Subjected wind turbines, both equipped with an asynchronous power generator, are located at two sites and are defined as wind turbine A and wind turbine B in this study, respectively. Their performance differences are examined by measuring wind speed and electric parameters. The study suggests that both wind turbines have a clear linkage between current and output power fluctuations. Comparison of the fluctuations to wind speed fluctuation, although they are triggered primarily by wind speed fluctuation, clearly indicates the specific behaviors inherent to the respective turbine control mechanisms.

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