Failure risk control for aeroengine turbine disks based on active thermal management

Abstract

Turbine system cooling is essentially a process of thermal management. Active thermal management based on thermal load redistribution has been proposed to overcome the limits of passive thermal management based on thermal protection. This research uses this proposition to study the effect of active thermal management on the failure risk of disks and explores possible means for risk control. Active thermal management is conducted by imposing additional heating energy on the disk hub, which is represented by the coefficient of additional heat flow η. Results show that the disk hub is the most risky part of the disk and that the failure risk of the disk can be effectively controlled by actively adjusting the thermal load distribution. The probability of disk failure declines by 76.1% under the active thermal management load (η=0.1) compared with the passive condition (η=0). The reason may be that as the temperature distribution of the disk turns into an artificial V-shape, the resulting thermal stresses induced by the negative temperature gradients counteract parts of the stress from rotating, and the failure risk decreases because of the reduced stress.