Advances in Technology
Gas turbine technology has steadily advanced since its inception and continues to evolve. Development is active in producing both smaller gas turbines and more powerful and efficient engines. Main drivers are computer design (specifically CFD and finite element analysis) and development of advanced materials: Base materials with superior high temperature strength (e.g., single-crystal superalloys that exhibit yield strength anomaly) or thermal barrier coatings that protect the structural material underneath from ever higher temperatures. These advances allowed higher compression ratios and turbine inlet temperatures, more efficient combustion and better cooling of engine parts.
On the emissions side, the challenge in technology is increasing turbine inlet temperature while reducing peak flame temperature to achieve lower NOx emissions to cope with the latest regulations. In May 2011, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries achieved a turbine inlet temperature of 1,600 °C on a 320 megawatt gas turbine, 460 MW in gas turbine combined-cycle power generation applications in which gross thermal efficiency exceeds 60%.
Additionally, compliant foil bearings were commercially introduced to gas turbines in the 1990s. They can withstand over a hundred thousand start/stop cycles and eliminated the need for an oil system. On another front, microelectronics and power switching technology have enabled commercially viable micro turbines for distributed and vehicle power.
Read more about this topic: Gas Turbine
Famous quotes containing the words advances and/or technology:
“The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father’s advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)