Abstract
One of the crucial issues regarding turbine maintenance is registering blade vibrations. These vibrations can cause serious damage to the engine. Turbine blade vibrations were measured during nominal speed as well as during run up and run down. A new, low cost Blade Tip Timing (BTT) is presented in this paper. It composes of two main modules: the FPGA unit and PC unit. The system is based on the TerasIC DE0-CV development board controlled by the Cyclone V 5CEBA4F23C7 chip. Units communicate via an Ethernet interface. The system measures a signal for every revolution as well as up to three signals coming from independent rotor blade sensors. The PC unit records these data in .csv files. The system can be adapted to process the signals of additional sensors. The measurements of the 1st stage compressor blade vibrations in an SO-3 engine prove that the system works correctly, with no data loss during transmission between system units, and compares well with other measurement systems as well as numerical results.
Highlights
Blade Tip Timing (BTT) is one of the methods of measuring blade vibrations
The current configuration of the proposed BTT system is the third version of the initial concept, which was originally designed for low-speed steam engine turbines only
The 3rd version of the system composes of two main parts of communicating via UDP protocol: a FPGA-based unit and a receiver desktop application called the PC unit. Both modules have been developed for the first time using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components
Summary
Each company has its own tip-timing system [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. These system consist of electronic hardware to measure the time of blade arrival and the signal at every rotor revolution. For the first time, a very cheap system will be presented. The measurements of this system for rotor blade amplitudes in the 1st stage of an SO-3 engine compare well with the measurements of other systems and numerical results
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