The customer wanted to develop a new rear stage with increased efficiency and mechanical stability for an industrial steam turbine.
They also looked to scale the same design for the entire fleet with five different Speeds and sizes of low-pressure turbines covering new and retrofit solutions.
The rear stage included the last and penultimate stage blades and guides.
Key Challenges
- Increase efficiency to justify retrofit applications
- Coupled blade for the mechanical stability at an optimum cost like a base version blade
- Scale the features for higher speeds of industrial applications and retain both performance and life criteria
- Design to meet manufacturing and assembly requirements due to high twist and taper of the airfoil
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The Solution
Infosys designed new profiles to meet efficiency requirements
- Carried out 1D and 3D assessments to meet the strength and lifetime requirements
- Retained root and rotor groove designs to reuse the tooling to minimize the cost of the product
- Cohesive working between aerodynamics, stress and mechanical design teams and factory yielded a high-quality product with minimal cost of development
- Scaled solutions for all five speeds of geared turbine applications
Complete end-to-end design and development of rear stage for industrial steam turbine fleet
- Six engineers worked for about nine months right from concept to development and release of manufacturing documentation
Benefits
- Rear efficiency increased by 5% with the number of starts crossing 10K cycles
- Rear stage scalable to the entire fleet of five different speeds
- Optimize the product cost to target cost and reduce development cost
- Release manufacturing documentation covering 3D models, part and assembly drawings, BOMs, I&T plans and test certificates
