Abstract
Blade tip clearance (BTC) measurement and active clearance control (ACC) are becoming crucial technologies in aero-engine health monitoring so as to improve the efficiency and reliability as well as to ensure timely maintenance. Eddy current sensor (ECS) offers an attractive option for BTC measurement due to its robustness, whereas current approaches have not considered two issues sufficiently. One is that BTC affects the response time of a measurement loop, the other is that ECS signal decays with increasing speed. This paper proposes a speed adjustment model (SAM) to deal with these issues in detail. SAM is trained using a nonlinear regression method from a dynamic training data set obtained by an experiment. The Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm is used to estimate SAM characteristic parameters. The quantitative relationship between the response time of ECS measurement loop and BTC, as well as the output signal and speed are obtained. A BTC measurement method (BTCMM) based on the SAM is proposed and a geometric constraint equation is constructed to assess the accuracy of BTC measurement. Experiment on a real-time BTC measurement during the running process for a micro turbojet engine is conducted to validate the BTCMM. It is desirable and significative to effectively improve BTC measurement accuracy and expand the range of applicable engine speed.
Highlights
With increasing applications of turbomachinery in various industrial fields, the requirement for multi-objective design methods, such as thermal efficiency, aerodynamic performance and structural life, has considerably increased in the last few decades [1,2,3]
Sensors 2019, 19, 761 instance, the aerodynamic loss caused by leakage flow of blade tip from the pressure surface to the suction surface accounts for about a third [5] of the total loss for a turbomachinery
Existing investigations on measuring blade tip clearance (BTC) by Eddy current sensor (ECS) mostly depend on various tests and have rarely considered problems in the particular case when a rotating blade passes over a sensor; one issue is that BTC affects the response speed of the sensor loop, the other is that the sensor signal decays with speed increasing
Summary
With increasing applications of turbomachinery in various industrial fields, the requirement for multi-objective design methods, such as thermal efficiency, aerodynamic performance and structural life, has considerably increased in the last few decades [1,2,3]. Afterwards, the size of the measured clearance affects the mutual inductance coefficient between the measured object and the sensor coil, influences the equivalent impedance of the measurement loop [31]. This makes that the response frequency of the measurement loop changes with the measured clearance. Existing investigations on measuring BTC by ECS mostly depend on various tests and have rarely considered problems in the particular case when a rotating blade passes over a sensor; one issue is that BTC affects the response speed of the sensor loop, the other is that the sensor signal decays with speed increasing.
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