Abstract
Cases of flutter appearing in the last stages of LP steam turbines have recently been reported. This paper presents a numerical analysis of flutter in the last stage of LP steam turbine blades using in-house, non-viscous and viscous codes as well as the ANSYS CFX viscous code. In the case of harmonic blade oscillations, instability regions were calculated using an aeroelastic damping coefficient for various interblade phase angles in five mode shapes. The distribution of this coefficient was also calculated along the blade length. It was found that flutter appears in the first mode shape. 3D viscous and non-viscous calculations showed that flutter appeared only in the first harmonic oscillation mode. In the other four modes, flutter did not appear. A negative aerodamping coefficient for the harmonic blade oscillations is not sufficient evidence of flutter. Conclusive evidence may be obtained using the two-way fluid–structure interaction procedure without assuming harmonic oscillation. In practice, the last stage LP rotor blades are mistuned and the pressure behind them is not uniform. Analysis of such conditions has to be done.
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