Study and numerical simulation of blades corrosion effects on a commercial axial turbine performance

With respect to special conditions apply to the gas turbine, its blades are affected by many different factors such as, hot corrosion, oxidation, wear, impact of external particles, and etc. and are destroyed. Due to the reduction of their working life time, the turbine efficiency reduces and ultimately the heavy costs of periodic repairs are needed, and also new replacements of their blades are unavoidable. The aim of this study is investigation of the effects of corrosion and blade damage on flow field and gas turbine performance, by numerical simulation. In this research, a two stage turbine is modeled in the form of three dimensional and the results are validated with experimental data. To analyze of the behavior of entire flow, conservation of mass, momentum, and energy equations are solved. The numerical simulation of the turbine is done with ANSYS CFX software. Then the increased rotors tip clearance effects with decreasing thickness due to corrosion in both nozzles and blade leading edge and trailing edge were separately studied on turbine flow field and its performance in five actual different pressure ratios. The results showed that the most important factor in reducing the efficiency of gas turbine is due to rotor tip clearance increasing. Also corrosion of the blade edge respect to the trailing edge damage is a little more affected on reducing efficiency and increasing loss coefficients.