Blade Diagnostics (United States)

La Rue, Elizabeth M. PhD, MLS; Sheehan, Brady BS; Garrighan, Daniel BS Author Information

During the production process, turbine blades are subjected to a solubilization heat treatment, followed by tempering treatment, in order to obtain better mechanical properties. It is observed that, in some cases, permanent distortion can occur during the high temperature treatment (austenitising temperature). In this work, a high temperature creep resisting steel blade with a simplified geometry is considered. A finite element model is developed considering: the material properties depending on temperature, phase transformation and viscoplasticity (Nabarro-Herring and bilinear kinematic models). A nonlinear transient thermo-mechanical analysis is performed to simulate a standard thermal cycle. Material properties are partially calibrated based on dilatometric tests and partially from data available in literature. Adopting a laser scanner system, the blades geometry is measured before and after the heat treatment to calculate the permanent deflection. Comparing numerical results with experiments, it has been observed that the distortion phenomenon is mainly affected by the low-stress diffusional creep. This effect is due to the fact that, during the heat treatment, the blade is held at high temperature for a relatively long time according to a particular supporting lay-out. To minimize the permanent distortion, the numerical model permits an appropriate supporting system to be set-up, whose validity has been confirmed experimentally.

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are not only responsible for providing prompt and efficient medical care to many different types emergencies, but also for fully documenting each and every event. Unfortunately, the vast majority of EMS events are still documented by hand. The documents are then further processed and entered manually into various billing, research, and other databases. Hence, such a process is expensive, labor intensive, and error prone. There is a dire need for more research in this area and for faster, efficient solutions. We present a solution for this problem: Prehospital Patient Care Record (PCR) for emergency medical field usage with a system called iRevive that functions as a mobile database application. iRevive is a mobile database application that is designed to facilitate the collection and management of prehospital data. It allows point-of-care data capture in an electronic format and is equipped with individual patient sensors to automatically capture vital sign data. Patient information from the field is wirelessly transmitted to a back-end server, which uses Web service standards to promote interoperability with disparate hospital information systems, various billing agencies, and a wide variety of research applications. In this chapter, we describe the current state of EMS, the iRevive application, a mini-trial deploying iRevive in real scenarios, the results, and a future direction for our solution.

Healthcare systems, especially Emergency Medical Services systems, will greatly benefit from new developments in mobile database technology. One area that has received little attention is the representation of rules for accurate data capture in a mobile environment. Herein we describe the use of semantic web technologies to embed rules in a mobile database. The rules are presented as Topic Maps and are accessed by a Semantic Interpretation Layer (SIL). Embedding rules in mobile healthcare applications will ensure accurate patient data capture and speed the creation of large knowledge bases of patient information. These knowledge bases will, in turn, support the creation of intelligent patient care systems that can not only define, but begin to anticipate patient care needs.