Turbine tip clearance of aero-engine is important to engine performance. Proper tip clearance can reduce the gas leakage over turbine blade tips and improve the engine efficiency of turbo machinery and reduce the fuel consumption. 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 may cause the material electromagnetic performance change for the conductivity and permeability varies with temperature. In order to verify the temperature effect on the sensor performance, the repeated calibration experiments were carried out to obtain the sensor repeatability error of 5.4%. Then, the sensor was calibrated in the range of 0 mm–4 mm clearance at temperature from 600 °C to 1000 °C and obtained the measurement error of 4.6%. Results indicate when the temperature ranged from 600 °C to 1000 °C, clearance measurement error is smaller than the sensor repeatability error so the temperature effect on the sensor characteristics can be ignored. This conclusion makes the sensor promising for monitoring the blade tip clearances at various temperature environment.

An inductive clearance measurement sensor has advantages of good anti-interference, fast response speed, and high sensitivity, and it has obvious technical potential in aeroengine turbine tip clearance measurement. In this paper, a rotor dynamic tip clearance measurement experiment system was designed based on a high-resolution inductive measurement system. The high temperature calibration experiment, performance verification experiment, and dynamic clearance measurement experiment under varying operating conditions were used to verify the high-temperature dynamic measurement performance of the measurement system. The resolution was used as the evaluation parameter of measurement performance. The experimental result shows the system has good resolution and dynamic response at 1000 °C, and the dynamic resolution reaches 10 μm in the 3 mm measuring range. The varying condition experiment results show that the blade deformation caused by the speed change of 1000–3000 r/min and the temperature change of 600–1000 °C can be resolved, and the resolution reaches about 10 μm. The research results verify that the inductance clearance measurement system has the characteristics of high temperature resistance and high resolution, and the technical specifications of clearance detection meet the basic requirements of dynamic clearance measurement of turbine tips, which provides an effective detection method for aeroengine health monitoring.