Improving Gas Turbine Performance Through Reassembling Degraded Components: An Experimental and Computational Study

Abstract

Performance degradation of gas turbine is a common phenomenon during operation. Maintenance of the degraded gas turbines and improving their performance at a low cost are important in engineering. In this paper, the maintenance method based on reassembling degraded components of existing gas turbines was studied. This research was based on a type of 2MW gas turbine engine. Blue ray scanning was carried out to rebuild the 3D flow-path geometries of the compressor and turbine of a degraded engine. Then CFD simulations were carried out to compare the characteristic maps of new and degraded components. Secondly, performance tests of six engines were carried out. A correction method was developed to get the specific component characteristics using test data, which can also analyze and quantify the degradations. Also, a gas turbine performance prediction program was used to find the promising component-exchange plan within 5 given gas turbines to improve total thermal efficiency. Finally, additional test was carried out to verify the performance of the reassembled gas turbine. Through the developed method including 3D scanning, CFD simulation, and correction of component characteristics with engine test data, the component performance degradation of a specific gas turbine can be obtained in quantity. The gas turbine performance predictions based on the acquired characteristic maps showed good agreement with test data. With the help of the method developed in this work, a new gas turbine engine was obtained through exchanging the components of degraded engines, which is at a very low cost and in a short time. The improvement in total thermal efficiency was about 0.3 percentage, which was verified by engine tests.