Impact of Mistuning on the Vibration Behaviour of the Last Stage in a Model Three Stage Low Pressure Steam Turbine

The last stages of a low-pressure steam turbine, with long freestanding blades, may experience forced response excitation during resonance crossing at start-up and shut-down and this can be responsible for blade failure. This paper presents an experimental investigation of the circumferential blade amplitude distribution at different operating conditions and for different mistuning configurations in a scale model of a state-of-the-art low pressure steam turbine. Five configurations are investigated; two with different intentionally mistuned frequency arrangements, where the blades are placed alternately in different high-low configurations and three randomly mistuned systems. For the randomly mistuned systems the standard deviation of the resonance frequencies of the last stage blades is varied. The maximum blade amplitude and the circumferential blade amplitude distribution of each mistuning configuration are compared at different operating points and at a repeatable rotational speed gradient. The behaviour of the blade amplitude distribution at different operating conditions shows that the vibration levels depend on both the mistuning configuration and the operating points.Copyright © 2011 by ASME