Investigative study of the reliability of a rotating turbine blade

-Turbine blading incidents are a concern to electrical utilities since they can result in power plant unavailability. The reliability of a particular turbine blade is investigated in this report to determine if it can be replaced with a more reliable blade design. The majority of incidents concerning this blade have been attributed to stall flutter vibration that has been the result of unit operation at low load levels with high back-pressures in the steam condenser. Stall flutter can be avoided by limiting back-pressure levels during low load operation and is thus not a concern here. Another potential cause of unreliability is stress corrosion cracking of the rotor portion of the blade attachment. A life calculation is developed and predicts that stress corrosion cracking of the rotor portion of the blade attachment poses no threat to the reliability of this blade