Original Paper(Vol.62 No.6 pp.383-389)

Estimation of Corrosion Fatigue Life by Evaluation on Corrosion Pit Damage in Gas Turbine Compressor Blades under Service Conditions

Kunihiro ICHIKAWA, Kunio ASAI,@Masaru SEKIHARA, Kazuhiko KAWAI, Yukio KAGIYA and Makoto YAMAURA

Abstract:Corrosion fatigue is one of the most important issues involved in operating compressors in gas turbine power plants securely. To address this issue, we investigated corrosion pit growth as well as crack growth behavior initiated from corrosion pits. We also developed a method for evaluating corrosion fatigue life under service conditions. Although we did not observe any obvious relationship between operative stress and corrosion pit sizes of operated compressor blades, our investigation results suggested that corrosion pit growth was dependent on operational time. We therefore calculated and propose an estimation curve for corrosion pit growth. Under a corrosive environment with highly concentrated Na,+, Cl-, and SO42-, the fatigue limit decreased to 40% of in-air strength. It also tended to decrease in inverse proportion to artificial defect size. We calculated crack growth threshold stress range th from the relationship between stress and artificial defect size and found that the crack growth threshold stress intensity factor range Kth was 2.4MPam under a corrosive environment. We also measured operative stress in compressor blades under service conditions and calculated equivalent stress eq from stress frequency distribution. We found out that corrosion pit size corresponding to crack initiation was 0.58mm from obtained eq and Kth and developed an evaluation diagram for calculating operational time from our estimation curve for corrosion pit growth. Our results suggest that we can measure operative stress to evaluate corrosion fatigue life quantitatively and formulate allowable stress.

Key Words:Gas turbine, Compressor, Corrosion fatigue, Corrosion pit, Maintenance, Vibrational stress, Fracture mechanics