L. Gray, J. Midgley, S. Tulpule, J. W. Littles, D. Harmon, Pratt & Whitney, East Hartford, CT; G. C. Muschlitz, Navy, Patuxent River, MD
For many years, Pratt & Whitney (P&W) has developed and leveraged advanced analytical methods and instrumentation technologies to ensure the health and safety of gas turbine engines. In the last decade, working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the United States Air Force (USAF), United States Navy (USN), and academia, P&W has extended these capabilities to enable a structural prognosis and engine health management (SPHM) system for fielded systems. SPHM is an integrated family of technologies that will allow P&W and operators of P&W products to monitor the health and remaining capability of engines based on the actual and planned future usage of each engine.The potential safety implications and cost of a fatigue crack in gas turbine engine disks have brought significant interest to expanding rotor life prediction and management capabilities. Blade tip time of arrival sensors in combination with physics-based modeling can be used to identify and monitor the growth of fatigue cracks in disk rim features. An integrated prognosis system incorporating these technologies has been demonstrated on component spin tests under the DARPA Engine Systems Prognosis (ESP) program.
Summary: This presentation describes the implementation and validation of a physics-based structural prognosis system for low cycle fatigue crack monitoring in fan and compressor disks.
