Influence of the Operational Wear of the Stator Parts of Shroud Seals on the Economic Efficiency of the Steam Turbines

During the operation of steam turbines under transient conditions, due to different thermal expansion of the stator and rotor parts in the radial and axial directions, the clearances fixed in the course of assembling the seals of the flow path change, which causes rubbing in the seals and the wear of the latter. This inevitably increases the leakages through the seals. A particularly large difference in the relative axial and radial displacements of the rotor and stator parts is observed during the turbine start-ups when the difference in their temperature expansion is maximal. Upon the turbine stops, the turbine shafting runs down freely, as a rule, passing through all critical speeds at which the amplitude of the shafting oscillations reach their peak values, which also leads to seizures in the seals and their wear and tear. The seizures in the seals may also be a consequence of the eccentricity between the rotor and stator caused by the thermal strain of the stator, incorrect choice of the clearances, floating-up of the rotor in the bearing, and many other factors. Recently, standard shroud labyrinth seals are being replaced in the steam turbines by seals with honeycomb stator inserts, the design of which allows the ridges to cut into the honeycomb surface without damaging the former, which allows fixing a radial clearance in the seals of 0.5 mm. On the honeycomb surface where the ridges touch it, grooves are cut through. The wear of the shroud seals reduces the efficiency of the steam turbines during the operation to the greatest degree. However, by the present there have been no exact quantitative data available on the change in the leakage through the worn-out honeycomb seals. The paper presents the results of comparative experimental studies on the flow and power characteristics of seal models with smooth and honeycomb stator parts for various degrees of their wear. The studies showed that the leakages through the worn-out stator parts of the honeycomb seals increase approximately 1.7 times slower than under the similar wear of the ridges of conventional straight-through seals with smooth stator parts. However, this gain in efficiency achieved by replacing the standard smooth-wall seals with the honeycomb seals must be necessarily correlated with the measurement data on the nonconservative shroud forces in conventional axial-radial seals with smooth stator surfaces with a radial clearance of 4 mm, which is almost seven times lower than that in the honeycomb seals with a radial clearance of 0.5 mm. From the results obtained in the work, it follows that the installation of honeycomb shroud seals instead of traditional ridge seals in the high-pressure cylinders (HPCs) of the steam turbines for subcritical steam parameters with high-vibration-resistance rotors that have a sufficient margin of resistance to self-oscillations is undoubtedly advisable from the point of view of increasing the economic efficiency of the turbines. However, the use of honeycomb shroud seals with reduced radial clearances in the HPC parts of the steam turbines for supercritical steam parameters requires special cautiousness, since it is in the area of small clearances that the maximum nonconservative shroud forces capable of causing auto-oscillations of the shafting are observed and these forces are maximal precisely at high pressures.