Stability Characteristics of Supercritical High-Pressure Turbines Depending on the Designs of Tilting Pad Journal Bearings

In this study, for a high-pressure turbine (HPT) of 800 MW class supercritical thermal-power plant, considering aerodynamic cross-coupling, we performed a rotordynamic logarithmic decrement (LogDec) stability analysis with various tilting pad journal bearing (TPJB) designs, which several steam turbine OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) currently apply in their supercritical and ultra-supercritical HPTs. We considered the following TPJB designs: 6-Pad load on pad (LOP)/load between pad (LBP), 5-Pad LOP/LBP, Hybrid 3-Pad LOP (lower 3-Pad tilting and upper 1-Pad fixed), and 5-Pad LBPs with the design variables of offset and preload. We used the API Level-I method for a LogDec stability analysis. Following results are summarized only in a standpoint of LogDec stability. The Hybrid 3-Pad LOP TPJBs most excellently outperform all the other TPJBs over nearly a full range of cross-coupled stiffness. In a high range of cross-coupled stiffness, both the 6-Pad LOP and 5-Pad LOP TPJBs may be recommended as a practical conservative bearing design approach for enhancing a rotordynamic stability of the HPT. As expected, in a high range of cross-coupled stiffness, the 6-Pad LBP TPJBs exhibit a better performance than the 5-Pad LBP TPJBs. However, contrary to one's expectation, notably, the 5-Pad LOP TPJBs exhibit a slightly better performance than the 6-Pad LOP TPJBs. Furthermore, we do not recommend any TPJB design efforts of either increasing a pad offset from 0.5 or a pad preload from 0 for the HPT in a standpoint of stability.