Rotor-Blade Interaction During Blade Resonance Drive-Through

Abstract

In the future energy landscape, combined cycle power plants will increasingly take the role of providing balancing power for fluctuating renewable energy sources due to their high availability and fast start-up times. This implies more frequent cycling, a larger number of speed cycles and thus new challenges for plant design and operation. One of these challenges is a potential increase of cyclic fatigue incurred by last-stage blades during start-up and coast-down. Blade vibrations might be induced by synchronous shaft vibrations when the blade resonance is excited by lateral shaft vibrations. In this paper, we report measurement results of shaft and blade vibrations observed at some Siemens Energy steam turbines. Apart from the expected increase of blade vibrations when the double rotating speed crosses the blade resonance, a distinctive dip of shaft vibrations at the low-pressure turbine bearings is observed. We argue that this phenomenon is likely related to the aforementioned interaction between blade and shaft vibrations and present a theoretical framework to describe this interaction and the observed effect.