• Tribology and Lubricants
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• 제33권2호
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• pp.65-70
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• 2017

In vertical hydro/hydraulic power turbine-generator applications, traditionally, cylindrical turbine guide bearings (TGBs) are widely used to provide turbine runner shafts with smooth rotation guides and supports. All existing cylindrical TGBs with simple plain pads have drawbacks such as having no pressure generation and film stiffness at the no-load condition and in addition, at the low-load/low-eccentricity condition, having very low film stiffness values and lacking design credibility in the stiffness values themselves. In this paper, in order to fundamentally improve the low-load/low-eccentricity performance of conventional cylindrical TGBs and thus enhance their design-application availability and usefulness, we propose to introduce a rotation-directional leading-edge taper to each partitioned pad, i.e., a pad leading-edge taper. We perform a design analysis of lubrication performance on $4-Pad{\times}4-Row$ cylindrical TGBs to verify an engineering/technical usefulness of the proposed pad leading-edge taper. Analysis results show that by introducing the leading-edge taper to each pad of the cylindrical TGB one can expect a constant high average direct stiffness with a high degree of design credibility, regardless of load value, even at the low-load/low-eccentricity condition and also control the average direct stiffness value by exploring the taper height as a design parameter. Therefore, we conclude that the proposed pad leading-edge tapers are greatly effective in more accurately predicting and controlling rotordynamic characteristics of vertical hydro-power turbine-generator rotor-bearing systems to which cylindrical TGBs are applied.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• 제34권1호
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• pp.16-22
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• 2018

Cylindrical turbine guide bearings (TGBs) with simple plain pads have conventionally been used in vertical hydro-power turbine-generator applications in order to provide turbine runner shafts with smooth rotation guides and supports. To overcome low-load/low-eccentricity performance drawbacks, such as very low film stiffness and lack of design credibility in the stiffness values themselves, of conventional cylindrical TGBs, the introduction of a rotational-directional leading-edge taper to each partitioned pad, simply pad leading-edge taper, has been found to be very effective in enhancing their design-application availability and usefulness. In this study, we investigate the effects of taper angle and length for given taper heights in detail in order to systematically establish the effectiveness of design on the performance improvement of vertical hydro-power application cylindrical TGBs with pad leading-edge tapers. The analysis results with $4-Pad{\times}1-Row$ cylindrical TGBs show that the lubrication performance of the cylindrical TGBs is optimized with an approximate taper angle ratio of 0.8 and taper length ratio of 0.9. We conclude that the introduction of pad leading-edge tapers along with the optimization of taper designs can be very effective in improving the overall operation reliability of cylindrical TGBs and the rotordynamic characteristics of vertical hydro-power turbine-generator rotor-bearing systems as well, to which the TGBs are applied.