Experimental investigation of high temperature-resistant inductive sensor for blade tip clearance measurement

Abstract

Turbine tip clearance of aero-engine is important to engine performance. Proper control of rotor tip clearance contributes to engine efficiency improvement and fuel consumption reduction. Therefore, accurate tip clearance measurement is essential. The inductive measurement method is one of the non-contact distance measurement methods, which has the characteristics of high sensitivity, fast response speed and strong anti-interference ability. Based on the principle of inductive sensor measuring tip clearance, the ambient temperature change will cause the material electromagnetic performance change for the conductivity and permeability varies with temperature. The calibration experiment was conducted to obtain the sensor resolution and sensing range. The effect of temperature on sensor parameters was extracted from high temperature experiment data. Results show the resolution of planar coil made of platinum wire can be 10 µm and the maximum sensing range can reach 5 mm. At temperature from 500 °C to 1100 °C, coil inductance almost does not change with temperature while coil resistance varies exponentially with temperature, that means the coil inductance variation can reflect the tip clearance change and resistance can indicate the measuring temperature.