Safety Evaluation of Cooling Configuration in a Rotor-Stator Cavity

A new and more sophisticated engineering evaluation system is developed by evaluating the cooling effectiveness among different cooling configurations in order to meet the airworthiness requirement in this paper. The temperature distribution of a disc is measured and applied to the thermal loading of the boundary condition, and the disk stress distribution is predicted by Finite Element Method (FEM) code. The results show that the value of the von Mises stress is not necessarily related to either the level of the overall temperature or the radial temperature difference. Instead, it is correlated positively with the radial temperature gradient. It can be concluded that the new evaluation system can help the designer restrict the operating boundaries of safety critical components within the security boundaries, and provide references for the active control technology, which need to be reckoned with during the safety design.