Thermo-mechanical fatigue crack propagation in a single-crystal turbine blade

Abstract: Simulation of crack growth in the internal cooling system of a blade in a Siemens gas turbine has been studied by inserting and propagating cracks at appropriate locations. The softwares used are ABAQUS and FRANC3D, where the latter supports finite element meshing of a crack and calculation of the stress intensities along the crack front based on the results from an external finite element program. The blade is subjected to thermo-mechanical fatigue and the cracks are grown subjected to in-phase loading conditions.   The material of the blade is STAL15SX, a nickel-base single-crystal superalloy. The <001> crystalline direction is aligned with the loading direction of the blade, while the secondary crystalline directions are varied to examine how it affects the thermo-mechanical crack propagation fatigue life of the blade.   The finite element model is set up using a submodeling technique to reduce the computational time for the simulations. Investigations to validate the submodeling technique are conducted.   From the work it can be concluded that a crack located at a critical location in the cooling lattice reach above the crack propagation target life. Cracks located at noncritical locations have crack propagation lives of a factor 5.2 times the life of the critical crack.