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Rubbing between the central rotor and the surrounding stationary components of machinery such as large-scale turbine units can escalate into severe vibration, resulting in costly damage. Although conventional vibration analysis remains an important condition monitoring technique for diagnosing such rubbing phenomena, the non-destructive measurement of Acoustic Emission (AE) activity at the bearings on such plant is evolving into a viable complementary detection approach, especially adept at indicating the early stages of shaft-seal rubbing. This paper presents a case study on the application of high frequency acoustic emissions as a means of detecting and verifying shaft-seal rubbing on a 217MVA operational steam turbine unit. The generation of AE activity is attributed to the contact, deformation, adhesion and ploughing of surface asperities on the rubbing surfaces of the rotor and stator.

Measurements of vibration and combustion chamber dynamic pressures have been taken on a number of 150 MW industrial gas turbines operating on pre-mixed natural gas, both during long periods of base-load operation and during short duration load-swings. The data has been analyzed in terms of the frequency and bandwidth of the principle peak in the vibration and pressure spectra as a function of load and other operating parameters. It is observed that bandwidth, which is a measure of the damping of the resonant mode of the combustion chamber’s acoustic resonance, decreases towards zero as the machines approach their combustion stability limits. A theoretical model of the thermoacoustic behavior of the combustion system has been developed to see to what extent the observed behavior on the operational machines can be explained in terms of an acoustic model of the ductwork and a flame characterized simply by a time-delay. This time delay is obtained from the frequency response function of the flame in response to unsteady perturbations in inlet velocity and is calculated using computational fluid dynamics. The model has also been used to illustrate the importance of fuel supply system design in controlling combustion stability. It is shown that stability can be a strong function of the acoustic impedance of the fuel supply and that this can lead to enhanced or reduced stability depending on the flame characteristics. [S0742-4795(00)01403-4]

Measurements of vibration and combustion chamber dynamic pressures have been taken on a number of 150MW industrial gas turbines operating on pre-mixed natural gas, both during long periods of base-load operation and during short duration load-swings. The data has been analysed in terms of the frequency and bandwidth of the principle peak in the vibration and pressure spectra as a function of load and other operating parameters. It is observed that bandwidth, which is a measure of the damping of the resonant mode of the combustion chamber’s acoustic resonance, decreases towards zero as the machines approach their combustion stability limits. A theoretical model of the thermoacoustic behaviour of the combustion system has been developed to see to what extent the observed behaviour on the operational machines can be explained in terms of an acoustic model of the ductwork and a flame characterised simply by a time-delay. This time delay is obtained from the frequency response function of the flame in response to unsteady perturbations in inlet velocity and is calculated using computational fluid dynamics. The model has also been used to illustrate the importance of fuel supply system design in controlling combustion stability. It is shown that stability can be a strong function of the acoustic impedance of the fuel supply and that this can lead to enhanced or reduced stability depending on the flame characteristics.

No abstract