Gas Turbine Mixer Modelling Strategies and Afterburner Liner Burn-Through Diagnostics

• A mixer may be damaged either by cracks or mechanical deformation causing a change in geometry. Only the latter case is, in some cases, possible to detect by shifts in physical measurements such as pressures and temperatures. In general, deformations of the geometry of a mixer due to damage is very hard to identify and quantify with the onboard measurements available, especially for turbofans with high bypass ratio (BPR) where a damaged mixer may cause a slight loss in thrust rather than shifts in measurable quantities.A special case of mixer damage that may be detected is burn-through of the afterburner liner in low bypass afterburning turbofans. The liner is used to protect the outer casing of the gas turbine to the high temperatures during afterburner operation. For this, the liner need to be continuously cooled by bypass air to withstand the temperatures. A burn-through is generally caused by a local blockage of the cooling path, leading to temperatures the liner cannot withstand. In severe cases it may cause a burn-through of the gas turbine outer casing as well where it may cause a fire in the engine bay.In this paper, two diagnostic routines are developed to identify a burn-through of an afterburner liner. The diagnostics is intended to be performed as a part of the startup check of the gas turbine to increase the confidence that no burn-through has occurred during the last operation. For these methods a mixer model of high enough fidelity is required, which is described in the paper. The main conclusion is that with enough data it is possible to detect a burn-through but the data collection time is so long that the methods need to be further enhanced to be of any practical use.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Rymd- och flygteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Aerospace Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Mixer

Modelling

Diagnostics

Afterburner

Burn-Through

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)