A
turbine blade is the individual component which makes up the
turbine section of a
gas turbine. The blades are responsible for extracting energy from the high temperature, high pressure gas produced by the
combustor. The turbine blades are often the limiting component of gas turbines. To survive in this difficult environment, turbine blades often use exotic materials like
superalloys and many different methods of cooling, such as internal air channels,
boundary layer cooling, and
thermal barrier coatings. The blade fatigue failure is one of the major source of outages in any
steam turbines and
gas turbines which is due to high dynamic stresses caused by blade vibration and resonance within the operating range of machinery. To protect blades from these high dynamic stresses, friction dampers are used.