GAS TURBINES

Turbine blades:
Good, better, best
By Lee S Langston, professor emeritus, UConn

About 60 years ago, a small group of To eliminate the deleterious effects insidious life-limiter, is the tendency
industrial researchers specializing of impurities, investment casting is of blade material to deform at a
in gas turbines set out to eliminate carried out in vacuum chambers. After temperature-dependent rate under
grain boundaries in superalloy turbine casting, the working surfaces of these stresses well below the material’s
blades. The result: A class of single- cooled turbine airfoils are coated with yield strength.
crystal blades that has increased both ceramic thermal-barrier coatings to Corrosion and cracks also start at
gas-turbine thermal efficiency and increase life and act as an insula- grain boundaries. In short, physical
component service life, while provid- tor—allowing inlet temperatures 100 activities initiated at superalloy grain
ing unmatched resistance to boundaries greatly shorten
high-temperature creep and the lives of turbine vanes and
fatigue. The article below traces blades, and dictate lower-than-
the road taken. optimal turbine temperatures

G
with a concurrent decrease in
as turbine (GT) engine performance.
thermal efficiency One can try to gain suffi-
increases with higher cient understanding of grain-
temperatures of the boundary phenomena so as to
gas flow exiting the combustor control them. However, in the
and entering the work-produc- early 1960s, researchers at
ing component—the turbine. Pratt & Whitney Aircraft (now
Turbine inlet temperatures Pratt & Whitney, P&W, owned
in the gas path of modern by United Technologies Corp)
high-performance jet engines set out to deal with the problem
can exceed 3000F, while non- through elimination of grain
aviation gas turbines typically boundaries from turbine air-
Howmet

operate at 2700F or lower. foils, by inventing techniques to

In the highest-temperature cast single-crystal (SX) turbine
regions of the turbine, special high- 1. Ceramic mold for multiple direc- blades and vanes.
melting-point nickel-base alloy blades tionally solidified turbine blades is One-dimensional crystals.
and vanes are used because of their placed in a vacuum furnace at How- P&W’s first step in the development
ability to retain strength and resist met’s foundry in Terai, Japan. Molten of SX blades was directional solidifica-
hot corrosion at extreme tempera- superalloy will be poured into the mold tion (DS). Carried out in vacuum fur-
tures. These so-called superalloys, nace, DS is accomplished by pouring
when conventionally vacuum cast, to 300 deg F higher. molten superalloy metal into a verti-
soften and melt at temperatures Grain-boundary problems. Con- cally mounted, ceramic mold heated to
between 2200F and 2500F. ventionally cast turbine airfoils are metal melt temperatures, and filling
This means blades and vanes closest polycrystalline, consisting of a three- the turbine airfoil mold cavity from
to the combustor may be operating in dimensional mosaic of small metallic root to tip (Fig 1).
gas-path temperatures far exceeding equiaxed crystals, or “grains,” formed The bottom of the mold is formed
their melting point and must be cooled during solidification in the casting by a water-cooled copper chill plate
to acceptable service temperature (typi- mold. Each equiaxed grain has a dif- having a knurled surface exposed to
cally eight-to-nine-tenths of the melting ferent orientation of its crystal lattice the molten metal. At the knurled chill
temperature) to maintain integrity. from its neighbors’. Resulting crystal- plate surface, crystals form from the
Thus, turbine airfoils subjected to lattice misalignments form interfaces liquid superalloy and the solid inter-
the hottest gas flows take the form called grain boundaries. face advances, from root to tip.
of elaborate superalloy investment Life-limiting events happen at The mold is surrounded by a tem-
castings to accommodate the intri- grain boundaries—such as inter- perature-controlled enclosure, which
cate internal passages and surface granular cavitation, void formation, maintains a temperature distribution
hole patterns necessary to channel increased chemical activity, and on the lateral surfaces of the mold so
and direct cooling air (bled from the slippage under stress loading. These that latent heat of solidification is
compressor) within and over exte- conditions can lead to creep, shorten removed by one-dimensional transient
rior surfaces of the superalloy airfoil cyclic strain life, and decrease over- heat conduction through the solidi-
structure. all ductility. Recall that creep, an fied superalloy to the chill plate. As
28 COMBINED CYCLE JOURNAL, Number 48, First Quarter 2016
 GAS TURBINES
the solidification front advances from
Radiation root to tip, the mold is slowly lowered
heating out of the temperature-controlled
enclosure.
The final result is a turbine airfoil
composed of columnar crystals or
grains running in a span-wise direc-
Molten tion. For the case of a rotating turbine
metal blade, where span-wise centrifugal
forces set up along the blade are on
the order of 20,000 g, the columnar
grains are now aligned along the
Ceramic major stress axis. Their alignment
Radiation mold strengthens the blade and effectively
cooling
eliminates destructive intergranular
Single crystal crack initiation in directions normal
selector to blade span.
In gas-turbine operation, DS tur-

Howmet
Water-cooled
chill plate Columnar grain bine blades and vanes have much
starter block improved ductility and thermal
fatigue life. They also provide a great-
2, 3. Single-crystal blade is made by a process like that shown in the simplified er tolerance to localized strains (such
sketch at left. Vacuum furnace is opened after casting a cluster of single-crystal as at blade roots), and have allowed
gas-turbine blades in a ceramic mold (right). Note the chill plate beneath the mold small increases in turbine tempera-
ture (and, hence, performance).
Their first use by P&W in a pro-
duction engine was in 1969, to power
the SR-71 Blackbird supersonic recon-
naissance aircraft. Commercial jet
engine use of these airfoils followed,
starting in 1974.
One crystal, one turbine blade.
Building upon directional solidifica-
tion, P&W reached its goal of elimi-
nating turbine airfoil grain boundar-
ies in the late 1960s.
The making of a single-crystal
turbine airfoil starts in the same
Howmet

manner as a directional solidification

airfoil, with carefully controlled mold
temperature distributions to ensure
4. Turbine blades (first stage, short; second or third stage, taller) are acid- transient heat transfer in one dimen-
etched to show grain structure. Pair at left is single crystal; center, directionally sion only, to a water-cooled chill plate
solidified; right, equiaxed (Figs 2, 3). Columnar crystals form
at the knurled chill plate surface in
2012
1100 PWA1484 ReneN6
a mold chamber called the “starter.”
Conventional The upper surface of the starter nar-
casting CMSX-4
CMSX-10 rows to the opening of a vertically
NASAIR10 mounted helical channel called the
PWA1480 CL186LC
1832 “pigtail,” which ends at the blade
MM200Hf MM247
1000 root. The pigtail admits only a few
Temperature capability, F/C

MM246 MM247
MM200 columnar crystals from the starter.
IN713C Rene80 Single Crystal orientations grow at differ-
IN738LC crystal
U700 Directionally
ent rates into the liquid metal in the
1652 pigtail, with one orientation growing
900 N100 solidified
the fastest. Thus, with ample coils,
Waspaloy
only one crystal emerges from the
N90 pigtail into the blade root, to start
1472
the single crystal structure of the
800 airfoil itself.
N80A In the 1970s, after SX production
N80 techniques were developed, SX tur-
bine airfoils were installed in P&W’s
NASA

1292F F100 production engines, to power the

700C
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 F-15 and F-16 jet fighters. The first
Year developed commercial aviation use was in the
5. Development of alloys for turbine blades, traced in timeline, shows supe- JT9D-7R4 jet engine, which received
riority of single-crystal structure. Note that the temperature capability is the flight certification in 1982, powering
temperature for creep life posed as the time (1000 hours) the alloy reaches a the Boeing 767 and Airbus A310.
certain elongation/strain (1%) under a given stress (20,000 psi) The first use of SX turbine airfoils
30 COMBINED CYCLE JOURNAL, Number 48, First Quarter 2016
 in land-based GTs was for corrosion
resistance in a 163-MW machine,
the Siemens V94.3A (now SGT5-
4000F), introduced to market in 1995.
In recent years, electric-power GT
inlet temperatures have increased
to aviation levels, so the SX airfoils
with higher temperature capacity
are now needed for long life. The SX
turbine blades and vanes in GE and
Siemens H-class machines are huge,
with lengths of from about 1 to 1.5 ft,
with each finished casting weighing
more than 30 lb.
The result. In gas-turbine use,
single-crystal turbine airfoils have
proven to have as much as nine
Premiere
times more relative life in terms of Turbine
creep strength and thermal fatigue
resistance and over three times more Generator
relative life for corrosion resistance,
when compared to equiaxed-crystal
Mechanic
counterparts.
By eliminating grain boundar-
Training
ies, SX airfoils have longer thermal Program
and fatigue life, are more corrosion-
resistant, can be cast with thinner in the
walls—meaning less material and less
weight—and have a higher melting-
Southeast!
point temperature. These improve-
ments all contribute to higher thermal
efficiency. 100% placement rate
Cost-wise, a turbine designer can
choose from among the airfoils shown
in Fig 4: equiaxed (less expensive),
Enrolling now for
DS (expensive), SX (more expensive),
plus SX with exact lattice orientation
January 2016
specified (most expensive). Because
single-crystal properties, such as elas-
tic modulus (the tendency of the mate-
Financial assistance
rial to deform along a specific axis),
vary with lattice angular orientation,
available to
the optimization of this property can
improve specific problem areas of
those qualified
blade design—such as creep life or
critical vibration modes.
Fig 5 shows creep-life progress
in turbine-blade alloys. In the plot,
the abscissa gives the year of alloy
development and the ordinate pres-
ents the temperature capability for a
variety of turbine-blade superalloys.

Fort Myers
As shown, single-crystal blades are
clearly superior. ccj

Lee S Langston,
professor emeritus technical college
of mechanical engi-
neering, University of
Connecticut, joined
Pratt & Whitney Air-
3800 Michigan Ave.
craft as a research
engineer after receiv-
i n g h i s P h D f ro m
Fort Myers, FL 33916
Stanford University in
1964. A Life Fellow of ASME, he has
served the society as editor of its Jour-
(239) 334-4544
nal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and
Power and as a director of the ASME
International Gas Turbine Institute. www.FortMyersTech.edu
32 COMBINED CYCLE JOURNAL, Number 48, First Quarter 2016