Failures of turbine blades are identified as the leading causes of unplanned outages for steam turbine. For the safety and economic reasons it is very important to detect the blade failure in its early phase. Namely, turbine operation with rotor blade failure can lead to catastrophic turbine damage and also can cause serious injury or death to anyone unfortunate enough to be standing near the turbine at the moment of failure. Obviously, blade failure detection is a very serious matter, and machines that are suspected of having a blade failure must be treated with the utmost respect. This article presents a case history of diagnosis of steam turbine rotor blade breakage using continuously collected vibration data. |