An efficient electromagnetic and thermal modelling of eddy current pulsed thermography for quantitative evaluation of blade fatigue cracks in heavy-duty gas turbines

The blade surface fatigue cracks often occur during service of Heavy-Duty Gas Turbines (HDGT) in high temperature, high rotational velocity and high frequency vibration environment. These fatigue cracks seriously threaten the safe operation of heavy-duty gas turbines, which would cause significant hazard or economic loss. The quantitative evaluation of blade surface fatigue cracks is extremely significant to HDGT. Eddy current pulsed thermography (ECPT) is an emerging non-destructive testing technology and show great potential for fatigue crack evaluation. This paper proposes a novel electromagnetic and thermal modelling of ECPT to achieve fast and effective quantitative evaluation for surface fatigue cracks. First, the proposed numerical method calculates electromagnetic field using the reduced magnetic vector potential method in the frequency domain based on frequency series method. The thermal source is transformed to an equivalent and simple form according to the energy equivalent method. Second, the temperature signals of ECPT are calculated through the time-domain iteration strategy with a relatively large time step. Then the ECPT experimental setup is established and the developed simulator is validated numerically and experimentally. The developed simulator is five times faster than the previous one and can be applied to eddy current thermography (ECT) with any kind of excitation waveforms. Finally, the depth of surface fatigue crack is quantitatively evaluated by means of the developed simulator, which is not only a promising simulation progress for ECPT, but also can be an effective tool embedded HDGT though-life maintenance