TEST AND VALIDATION OF A MICROWAVE TIP CLEARANCE SENSOR ON A 25MW GAS TURBINE ENGINE

Анотація

Blade turbine monitoring is an important area of work for improvements in gas turbine operation. Blade tip clearance measurements offer improvement in engine efficiency by enabling active clearance control. However, this is a difficult measurement because of the harsh turbine environment. The high temperature microwave sensor presented in this paper is one of the most promising candidates for clearance measurement. It has been tested on the high pressure stage of a 25MW gas turbine engine during different operating modes. Moreover, the individual blade clearance measurement has been tested by using a rotor with ten shortened blades. The resulting measurement performance is very good in terms of precision and accuracy and show the efficacy of this measurement system.