Experimental Validation of Fretting Fatigue Strength and Fretting Wear Rate at Contact Surface of Turbine-Blade-Shroud Cover

In continuously coupled blade structures, fretting fatigue and wear have to be considered as supposed failure modes at the contact surface of the shroud cover, which is subject to steady contact pressure from centrifugal force and the vibratory load of the blade. We did unique fretting tests that modeled the structure of the shroud cover, where the vibratory load is only carried by the contact friction force, i.e., a type of friction. What was investigated in this study are fretting fatigue strength, wear rate, and friction characteristics, such as friction coefficient and slip-range of 12%-Cr steel blade material. The friction-type tests showed that fretting fatigue strength decreases with the contact pressure and a critical normal contact force exists under which fretting fatigue failure does not occur at any vibratory load. This differs from knowledge obtained through pad-type load carry tests that fretting fatigue strength decreases with the increase of contact pressure and that it almost saturates under a certain contact pressure. Our detailed observation in the friction-type tests clarified that this mechanism was the low contact pressure narrowing the contact area and a resulting high stress concentration at a local area. The fretting wear rate was explained by the dissipated energy rate per cycle obtained from the measured hysteresis loop between the relative slip range and the tangential contact force. It was found that the fretting wear rate is smaller than the wear rate obtained by one-way sliding tests, and the former is much smaller than the latter as the dissipated energy decreases. Finally, to prevent fretting fatigue and wear, we propose an evaluation design chart of the contact surface of the shroud cover based on our friction-type fretting tests.