Rotor dynamic analysis of 3D-modeled gas turbinerotor in Ansys

Abstract: The world we are living in today is pushing the technology harder and harder. The products need to get better and today they also need to be friendlier to the environment. To get better products we need better analysis tools to optimize them and to get closer to the limit what the material can withstand. Siemens industrial Turbomachinery AB, at which thesis work is made, is constructing gas and steam turbines. Gas and steam turbines are important in producing power and electricity. Electricity is our most important invention we have and most of the people are just taking electricity for granted. One way to produce electricity is to use a gas turbine which is connected to a generator and by combing the turbine with a steam turbine the efficiency can be up to 60 %. That is not good enough and everybody want to get better efficiency for the turbines, meaning less fuel consumption and less impact on the environment. The purpose of this thesis work is to analyze a tool for rotor dynamics calculations. Rotor dynamics is important in designing a gas turbine rotor because bad dynamics can easily lead to disaster. Ansys Classic version 11 is the analyze program that is going to be evaluated for the rotor dynamic applications. Nowadays rotor dynamics is done with beam elements i.e. 1D models, but in this thesis work the beam elementsare going to be changed to solid elements. With solid elements a 3D model can be built and thanks to that more complex calculations and simulations can be made. For example, with a 3D model 3D effects can be shown and e.g. simulations with blade loss can be done. 3D effects are not any problem today but in the future the gas turbines have to get better and maybe also the rotational speed will increase. Ansys isn’t working perfectly yet, there are some problems. However Ansys have a good potential to be an additional tool for calculations of rotor dynamics, because more complex calculations and simulations can be done. More knowledge and time needs to form the rules to modeled a rotor and developing the analysis methods. Today the calculated lateral critical speeds are lower than the ones obtained from the in-house program Ardas version 2.9.3 which is used in Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB today. The difference between the programs are not so big for the four first lateral modes, only 3-8 %, but the next three lateral modes have a difference of 10-20 %. The torsion frequencies from Ansys are the same as the ones from Ardas, when the Solid186 elements are used to model the blades.