Prediction of Remaining Useful Life for Service-Exposed Industrial Turbine Blade

The project aims to determine the remaining useful life of service-exposed gas turbine blades by conducting an experiment to calculate the creep life. Common practice in the industries is to replace the turbine blade after its useful life has expired which is typically specified by the manufacturers. This practice is very costly and may be considered as a waste of capital if the blade can still be used. By determining the remaining useful life of a gas turbine blade, we can prolong the service life of the blade. Conducting the project will require extensive studies on the basic principle of creep deformation in metal and creep life prediction methods. Larson-Miller Parameter, which is a mean of predicting the lifetime of a material versus time and temperature using a correlative approach based on the Arrhenius rate equation, is used to extrapolate the change in rupture life with test temperature at a given stress level after the accelerated testing for creep rupture is done on the turbine blades samples. Accelerated testing needs to be done by extremely increasing the testing temperature and applied stress, thus, shortening the rupture time because the creep rate for the specimens at low temperature and stress might take a longer time frame than provided by the project time limit. A High Temperature Creep Testing Machine should be used to perform the experiment to provide reliable results and the data gathered from the experiment will be tabulated accordingly to ease the process of determining remaining useful life of the sample. Conclusion of the project will be made after the experiment data is thoroughly analyzed.