Low-Load/Low-Eccentricity Performance Improvement Designs for Hydro Power Application of Cylindrical Turbine Guide Bearings - Introduction of Pad Leading-Edge Tapers

In vertical hydro/hydraulic power turbine-generator applications, traditionally, cylindrical turbine guide bearings (TGBs) are widely used to provide turbine runner shafts with smooth rotation guides and supports. All existing cylindrical TGBs with simple plain pads have drawbacks such as having no pressure generation and film stiffness at the no-load condition and in addition, at the low-load/low-eccentricity condition, having very low film stiffness values and lacking design credibility in the stiffness values themselves. In this paper, in order to fundamentally improve the low-load/low-eccentricity performance of conventional cylindrical TGBs and thus enhance their design-application availability and usefulness, we propose to introduce a rotation-directional leading-edge taper to each partitioned pad, i.e., a pad leading-edge taper. We perform a design analysis of lubrication performance on $4-Pad{\times}4-Row$ cylindrical TGBs to verify an engineering/technical usefulness of the proposed pad leading-edge taper. Analysis results show that by introducing the leading-edge taper to each pad of the cylindrical TGB one can expect a constant high average direct stiffness with a high degree of design credibility, regardless of load value, even at the low-load/low-eccentricity condition and also control the average direct stiffness value by exploring the taper height as a design parameter. Therefore, we conclude that the proposed pad leading-edge tapers are greatly effective in more accurately predicting and controlling rotordynamic characteristics of vertical hydro-power turbine-generator rotor-bearing systems to which cylindrical TGBs are applied.

수력 원통형 터빈 가이드 베어링의 저부하/저편심 성능향상 설계 - 패드 선단 테이퍼의 도입