Diagnostics of a crack in a load coupling of a gas turbine using the machine model and the analysis of the shaft vibrations

The diagnostics of malfunctions that can cause catastrophic failures has to be made in early stage in the industrial environment. Often flexible couplings are employed in industrial rotating machines when gearboxes and heavy thermal gradients are present. The hot and cold alignment of these couplings can be very different. Severe misalignments can generate cracks in the stub shafts, which can propagate in operating condition. Owing to the flexural flexibility of the load coupling, the shaft vibrations may be not noticeably affected by some typical symptoms that usually point out the presence of a crack, like twice per revolution harmonics in the vibration spectrum. Anyhow, suitable diagnostic strategies can detect clear fault symptoms, while model-based methods can confirm the occurrence of the shaft bow induced by the progressive yielding of a load coupling due to a crack. This paper shows as a model-based diagnostic methodology would have allowed a crack in a load coupling of a gas turbine to be identified before a serious failure happened by means of the shaft vibration analysis under operating conditions and rated speed. Finally, the vibrations caused by the shaft bow due to the propagation of a crack in the stub shaft of the coupling have been simulated using suitable equivalent excitations, the magnitude and phase of which have been estimated by means of a model-based identification method.