Effects of inlet chamber structure of the control stage on the unsteady aerodynamic force

Blade fatigue fracture is the main factor affecting the safe operation of the turbine and the aerodynamic exciting force caused by partial admission accelerates the fatigue failure of the control stage blade. In this paper, based on the threedimensional unsteady flow research of 300MW control stage, a new type of inlet chamber structure is proposed, which can reduce the local aerodynamic exciting force effectively. The performance of original structure and new structure is compared at 0.7 partial admission operation condition in details. Firstly, the paper gives the overall performance of the control stage under the two structures. It is proved that the new inlet chamber structure proposed in this paper only has a slight influence on the overall performance, which is shown as mass flow, power and efficiency. Secondly, distributions of flow parameters such as pressure, static entropy and axial velocity at the stator inlet and rotor inlet are given in the paper. The new structure is found to alleviate the sudden change of flow parameters such as pressure at the inlet steam chamber transition region. Finally, five key points of axial aerodynamic force and seven key points of tangential aerodynamic force are captured to illustrate the influence of partial admission on instantaneous aerodynamic exciting force. Further, the mechanism of new inlet chamber structure on local aerodynamic exciting forces is explained. The result shows that the new inlet chamber structure can reduce the local axial aerodynamic exciting force up to 13% and reduce the local tangential aerodynamic exciting force up to 29.7%, which is beneficial to improve the safety and reliability of the turbine operation.