Abstract

Advanced gas turbine engines, which use hot section airfoil cooling, present a wide range of design problems. The frequencies of applied loads and the natural frequencies of the blade also are important since they have significant effects on failure of the component due to fatigue phenomenon. Due to high temperature environment the thermal creep and fatigue are quite severe. One-dimensional creep model, using ANSYS has been formulated in order to predict the creep life of a gas turbine engine blade. Innovative mathematical models for the prediction of the operating life of aircraft components, specifically gas turbine blades, which are subjected to creep-fatigue at high temperatures, are proposed. The components are modeled by FEM, mathematically, and using similitude principles. Three models have been suggested and evaluated numerically and experimentally. Using FEM method for natural frequencies causes phenomena such as curve veering which is studied in more detail. The simulation studies on the life-limiting modes of failure, as well as estimating the expected lifetime of the blade, using the proposed models have been carried out. Although the scale model approach has been used for quite some time, the thermal scaling has been used in this study for the first time. The only thermal studies in literature using scaling for structures is by NASA in which materials of both the prototype and the model are the same, but in the present study materials also are different. The finite element method is employed to model the structure. Because of stress redistribution due to the creep process, it is necessary to include a full inelastic creep step in the finite element formulation. Otherwise over-conservative creep life predictions will be estimated if only the initial elastic stresses are considered. The experimental investigations are carried out in order to validate the models. The main contributions in the thesis are: (1) Using similitude theory for life prediction of components in general, and specifically using thermal scaling for the first time for prototype and model with two different materials. (2) Developing 1-D creep ANSYS macro to study creep effects to get meaningful results for industrial applications of gas turbine blade. (3) Analyzing the curve veering and flattening phenomena in rotating blade at thermal environment, using Lagrange-Bhat method. (4) Simple constitutive models in creep-fatigue interaction are proposed that can predict the lifetime in complicated situations of creep-fatigue, using the pure creep and pure fatigue test data.