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We lost an A bank turbo over the weekend. Upon inspection we found that the inner liner of the A bank turbo bellow had failed and liberated several pieces into the turbo turbine ultimately leading to catastrophic failure of the entire turbo. The outer housing of the turbo was in good shape and did not show any signs of wear or damage.
We have seen failures of the inner sleeves before, however they usually lead outer shell damage to the bellow and we see changes in the wastegate position so we can replace before the inner liner liberates.
Question: Is any one performing internal inspections to their turbo bellows or actively replacing turbo bellows after a certain number of starts/run hours?
We have 7900 hours and 2300 starts on this bellow.
Wartsila is experimenting with two new exhaust bellows materials at Antelope-Elk for the exact same reason as you detailed above. We are currently planning on replacing all of ours at 8000 hours or ~2000 Starts. We are also doing seasonal boroscopes to the best of our ability with limited access points.
Hopefully by the time they are replaced at the next interval there will be a fix that allows us to operate reliably.
Wartsila did an RCA and we had analysis done by a 3rd party. Findings were that the failure was due to thermal fatigue. Wartsila still wouldn’t say that the maintenance need was starts related and decided to put R&D into improving the bellows so that it would not fail. You can give me a call if you have any questions.
~Kevin Moore
Ops. Mgr. Antelope Elk Energy Center
806-298-4835
Has anyone received or has a copy of bulletin WS20T284? This apparently discusses an upgraded Turbo Bellow design. The bulletin does not exists in PW2’s customer portal and is applicable to 16/18V46 and 1850DF/SG with TPL 76C turbos. I was able to obtain a copy from my WNA representative.
We have not had a failure like that and we are not inspecting so far the expansion bellows in the manifold internally just visual externally but this will not help if the inner sleeve is the one that is coming apart.
Will take a look in the next opportunity if there is a port we can use for video-scope the inner sleeve.
I could not find the bulletin that Austin is refering in the wartsila portal we have. Can you please email it to me?
Ruben Tellez.
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