Effective Spectral Emissivity of Gas Turbine Blades for Optical Pyrometry

Turbine blade temperature measurements are important for monitoring the turbine engine performance to protect the hot components from damage due to excess temperatures. However, the reflected radiation from the blades and the surrounding environment complicate the blade temperature measurements by optical pyrometers. This study characterizes the effect of the reflected radiation on the effective spectral emissivity of a three-dimensional turbine blade in a confined turbine space for optical pyrometry temperature measurements. The effective spectral emissivity distribution on a three-dimensional blade was numerically determined for various wavelengths (0.8–15.0 μm) and actual blade surface emissivities for a specified turbine blade model. When the actual spectral emissivity of the blade surface is assumed to be 0.5, the effective spectral emissivity varies from 0.5 to 0.538 at the longer wavelength of 10.0 μm and further increases from 0.5 to 1.396 at the shorter wavelength of 0.9 μm. The results show that the effective emissivity distributions at shorter wavelengths differ greatly from those at longer wavelengths. There are also obvious differences between the effective spectral emissivity and the actual surface emissivity at shorter wavelengths. The effect of the effective emissivity on the temperature measurement accuracy, when using the optical pyrometry, was also investigated for various wavelengths (0.8–15.0 μm). The results show that the radiation reflected from the blades has less effect on the temperature measurements than on the effective emissivity, especially at the shorter wavelengths of 0.8–3.0 μm. However, the temperature measurements still need to be corrected using the effective spectral emissivity to improve the temperature calculation accuracy. This analysis provides guidelines for choosing the optimum measurement wavelengths for optical pyrometry in turbine engines.