Abstract
Turbine blades experience significant surface degradation with service. This paper presents experimental evidence of blade surface roughness reducing turbine efficiency. Performance tests were conducted in a low speed, single-stage axial flow turbine rig with roughened blade surfaces. Sheets of sandpaper with equivalent sandgrain roughnesses of 106 and $400{\mu}m$ were used to roughen the blades. In these tests, effects of roughened stator vanes and rotor blades were separately evaluated. In the fully rough regime ($k_{s}=400{\mu}m$), the experimental results show an 11 percent decrease in normalized efficiency with roughness only on stator vanes ; an 8 percent decrease with roughness only on rotor blades ; and a 19 percent decrease with roughness on both the stator and rotor blades. In the transitionally rough regime ($k_{s}=106{\mu}m$), the trends are similar approximately 4 percent decrease with either roughened stator or roughened rotor and an 8 percent decrease with roughness on both stator and rotor blades. Thus, roughened stator vanes incur more performance penalty than roughened rotor blades.