Illustrated Case Studies in the Maintenance Reliability Engineering World of Failure Analysis, Predictive Maintenance, and Non Destructive Evaluation |
| Sometimes forces that cannot be readily calculated or modeled are either ignored or assumed insignificant. Flow induced vibration should not be one of those parameters. | |
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Figure 1 |
The impeller blade shown in Figure 1 failed in service. The section shown here is approximately 10" in length; it is 1/2" thick. The leading edge of the blade is on the left. The remains of the weld is on the bottom. The load side of the blade is shown. The front view of the impeller is shown in Figure 2 with the broken blade still attached. Rotation of the impeller in Figure 2 is clockwise. |
Figure 2 |
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Figure 3 |
The broken blade shown in Figure 3 was inspected when the compressor shaft failed. The weld had fatigued along a 3" long section of the vertical heat affected zone (HAZ) of the weld. It was located about 7" in from the leading edge and was on both sides of the blade. In the region between 4" to 7" from the leading edge, the weld fatigued along the horizontal HAZ of the weld. The first 3" of fracture surface was located through the weld, on both sides. |
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Figure 4 clearly shows the progress of the beach marks from lower right toward the upper left. As the stress on the blade became greater, the beach marks fanned out, to the left, at a greater degree. Based upon the degree of fatigue and the small size of the shear lip, it was clear that the magnitude of the stress was very low. The unusual aspect of this failure was the fact that the fatigue started on the backside of the blade, not the front side as you might suspect. |
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Figure 4 |
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| So how does a blade get loaded on the compression side? Or should the question be rephrased as such, are there loads that put the backside of the blade in tension? If it is one thing that everyone agrees upon it is that cracks do not normally propagate in compression. So what could put the backside of a blade in tension? Possibly vibration induced by flow separation from the blade, or torsional fluctuations from erratic changes in the process flow. This fracture certainly suggests the possiblity. The failure indicates that whatever the problem cause, it was low in magnitude. However, it was not low enough and as a result it should not be ignored in design. There are methods to simulate flow induced vibration and this particular failure would warrant such an analysis. Unfortunately that won't happen. This blade went through 2.24xE10 revolutions. It may have instigated a catastrophic failure that will be showcased in a future article. | |
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