5 Reasons to Track Turbine Heat In-Situ on Gas Turbine Blades
Turbine heat has a profound effect on instrument survivability, engine efficiency, and overall fleet performance. However, it’s long been the tradition—across all industries that rely on turbine fleets—to detect heat via gas flow and not directly on gas turbine blades. The technology pioneered by Sensatek is poised to advance the standard for heat detection beyond these rudimentary methods.
Let’s break down the five reasons that heat sensor technology needs to shift to in-situ, on-blade turbine heat detection.
1. Avoid Engine Teardowns
Unlike solutions that meter gas temperatures (such as wired thermocouple sensors), a low-profile, wireless on-blade sensor is compact enough to fit into hard-to-reach locations and not constrained by the diameter of the slip ring. On-blade sensors make it possible to instrument multiple blades in-situ on gas turbine engines, without a costly, time-consuming teardown for the post-processing of data (as with paint/crystal solutions) or any drilling or machining to route more wires (for thermocouple sensors).
This saves on labor, time, and complexity, allowing you to efficiently implement numerous channels for sensitive data—even fleet-wide, which would never have been realistic when every sensor implementation requires a full engine teardown.
2. More Accurate Gas Turbine Blade Health Measurements
Paint and crystal-based test instruments record only the gas turbine engine’s highest temperatures—a fairly blunt measurement for such a nuanced piece of machinery. Infrared and fiberoptic solutions also suffer from accuracy issues at higher temperatures in addition to the emissivity errors expected in optical measurements of any kind.
Furthermore, gas flow temperatures are a far less reliable health indicator for gas turbine blades than direct measurements of blade metal surface temperatures. All of these factors make it critical to detect temperatures in real-time, directly on the gas turbine blade surface, to achieve truly accurate insights into blade life—which dictates the maintenance cycle.
3. Save on Costs
The labor costs associated with engine teardowns and thermocouple installation alone are enough to motivate a shift to wireless, in-situ sensor technology. The financial advantages of faster, simpler data collection include a shorter engine development cycle, improved measurement survivability, and reduced instrumentation test failure.
On-blade technology offers cost-saving benefits far beyond the testing environment, too. Consider how fleet-wide deployment could result in savings from:
- Early prediction of maintenance needs
- Reductions in repair costs
- Extended running time between maintenance outages
- Efficiency improvements in energy production
- Increased revenue
A wireless, in-situ, on-blade sensor solution pays for itself in short order.
4. Real-time Insights
Whereas previous technologies provided only a measure of the maximum test temperature experienced in the engine, a permanent on-blade sensor can survive full engine life deployment and provide continuous, real-time metrics at every stage of turbine engine operation. Since undetected hot-spots are not only a common industry problem but a frequent culprit of substantial repair costs and unplanned downtime, it’s critical to maintain full visibility into accurate gas turbine blade temperatures across fleet operations.
5. Improved Sensor Durability
Ceramic-derived on-blade sensors offer several crucial advantages in test instrument longevity. The low profile of these sensors avoids any aerodynamic heating and helps them survive incredibly high internal engine temperatures throughout a full engine life deployment. This diminutive form factor also provides excellent resilience to shearing forces with the proper high-temperature bonding agent. Without any need for external power sources or batteries, it’s quite simple to maintain the sensors post-installation.
These five advantages demonstrate a seismic shift in the value of turbine heat sensing technology. If you’re interested in learning more about in-situ installation of on-blade, wireless gas turbine sensors, contact Sensatek today to discuss this cutting-edge sensor design with our experts or sign up for our pilot program!