The dovetail attachment between the turbine blade and disk for an aero-engine operates under varying centrifugal load and vibration at elevated temperatures. The fretting fatigue is prone to occur at the contact surface of the dovetail attachment. This paper investigated the fretting fatigue behavior of the dovetail specimen at 630 °C through experiment and numerical simulation, in which the blade-like dovetail specimen is nickel-based single crystal superalloy DD10 while two fretting pads in contact with the dovetail specimen simulating the mortise of the disk are made of powder metallurgy FGH99. It is revealed from all the tests that the fracture induced by the fretting wear occurs at the upper edge area of the contact surface. The contact surface near the upper edge is more severely worn; hence, the phenomenon of partition on the worn contact surface can be observed, which is consistent with the fretting fatigue mechanism. Moreover, the calculated area of maximum contact pressure gradient through finite element method is in good agreement with the experimental position of the initial fretting fatigue cracks.

The tenon joint structure is a typical structure of aero-engine bladed disk. Under external excitation, micro-slip inevitably occurs between the tenon and the tenon groove of the blade, which will cause fretting wear on the contact surface. The resonance frequency and margin of the bladed disk structure will change after fretting wear occurs. In this paper, a finite element subprogram is compiled based on the basic principle of Archard wear, which realizes the generation of surface wear morphology and multi-step iterative update of the double-tooth fir-tree joint model under fretting load. The subroutine is used to quantitatively analyze the wear depth distribution of the tenon joint surface under fretting loads. On this basis, the resonance margin and the vibration response characteristics of the bladed disk are quantitatively studied after fretting wear. The research results show that the natural vibration frequency of the bladed disk structure decreases at different wear times. This caused a decrease in the resonance margin of more than 80% of the measuring points. In addition, the resonance response amplitudes all showed an upward trend with the increase of wear depth.

This study numerically investigates the influence of different fluid temperatures on the cavitation characteristics of a space-use micropump under microgravity conditions. A homogeneous multiphase model coupled with a thermal modified Zwart–Gerber–Belamri cavitation model is employed, and the SST turbulence model is applied to resolve the cavitating flow under rated and off-design flow rates. Results indicate that cavitation behavior is strongly dependent on both temperature and flow rate. At low temperatures, cavitation intensity increases, leading to reductions in head and efficiency and a slight increase in shaft power. In contrast, elevated temperatures suppress cavitation development, resulting in milder performance degradation and, in some cases, slight improvements in head and shaft power. Internal flow analysis reveals that lower temperatures promote more extensive vapor fraction distributions and greater flow distortion, while entropy production analysis shows that cavitation contributes limited additional loss overall, though entropy generation rises markedly under combined low temperature and high flow rate conditions. The findings highlight that cavitation effects are more pronounced at low temperatures and are further amplified at higher flow rates, providing insights for the design and reliable operation of space micropumps in on-orbit thermal management systems.

The present work examines how variations in working fluid temperature govern the hydrodynamic behavior of a space-rated micropump. Using perfluorotriethylamine as the operating medium, three-dimensional CFD simulations employing the SST k-$\omega$ turbulence closure were carried out across a broad thermal spectrum, and the resulting flow physics were interpreted through entropy generation analysis. Based on the entropy production theory, the influence laws of different inlet temperatures on the external characteristics, internal characteristics, and flow loss characteristics of the micropump were quantitatively analyzed. The results show that temperature mainly affects the micropump performance by changing the viscosity and density of the working fluid. At low temperatures, the fluid viscosity increases significantly, leading to increased flow resistance, intensified internal friction, reduced head and efficiency, and increased shaft power. As the temperature increases to 0 °C and above, the viscosity change tends to moderate, and the external characteristic parameters tend to stabilize. The internal characteristic analysis shows that under low-temperature conditions, the high-pressure region in the impeller area expands and the turbulent kinetic energy decreases, but the flow separation is to a certain extent suppressed. The region near the volute tongue and the impeller outer edge are the main areas of entropy production loss, and their entropy production rates increase significantly with decreasing temperature. Moreover, at low temperatures, the high entropy production regions expand from locally isolated distributions to continuous large-scale distributions. The impeller outer edge dominates total entropy production, driven by peak fluid linear velocity and intense shear interaction with the volute wall. The findings elucidate how working fluid temperature governs both the hydrodynamic performance and the irreversible loss characteristics of the micropump. These insights can directly inform the engineering design of thermal management loops intended for orbital applications under severe temperature swings.

In bladed machinery, discrete noise comes from the interference between the moving and stationary blade rows. Although the flow stability can be enhanced by improving the coupling structure parameters between the impeller and the pump casing, this method usually affects the performance of the bladed machinery seriously. Thus, the pressure fluctuation characteristics inside the in-orbit refueling propulsion pump can be improved by changing the blade arrangement. In centrifugal pumps, non - non-equidistant blade arrangement can reduce pressure-pulsation amplitude at the blade frequency, thus enhancing flow stability. In this paper, non - equidistant and equidistant blade models were designed using the non - equidistant blade arrangement method. The differences in their external characteristics were explored with the internal flow field and entropy-generation theories. Unsteady calculations were performed on both models under the same conditions. Pressure-pulsation characteristics in single-phase and cavitating flows were compared and analyzed.