LIFETIME EVALUATION OF THE MECHANICAL ELEMENTS FOR HYDRAULIC TURBINES BY NUMERICAL SIMULATION

摘要

Nowadays the capabilities of machines are pushed to the limit in order to achieve higher efficiencies, better performances, reducing the cost of production and maintenance. Suppliers of mechanical equipment invest more and more in developing modern techniques in order to study beforehand the behavior of their machines and equipment while in operation in order to decrease the cost of physical test and model test. They are looking to determine all the different challenges that equipment and equipment's components will face during transitory regimes in operation. This is one of the benefits of life cycle evaluation in which fatigue study for new equipment in designing and manufacturing. Another aspect is to determine the remaining lifetime of the equipment which is already in operation, so that it will work safely until the plan of maintenance is properly determined and then carried out. In this way, safety standards can be better respected and the cost of operation and repair is optimized. This paper is a continuation of these studies and presents improvements of the results that authors achieved in 2012. A new, more accurate and complex way to determine the remaining lifetime of components for a Kaplan hydraulic turbine is presented. The analyzed element is the turbine shaft. The main parameters taken into consideration for durability calculation are: model geometry, material properties and applied load for simulation.