Diesels and Gas Turbines
Ruston & Hornsby was a major producer of small and medium diesel engines for land and marine applications. The company began to build diesel locomotives in 1931 (and continued up until 1967). It was a pioneer and major developer in the industrial application of small (up to 10,000 kW) heavy duty gas turbines from the 1950s onwards. In the 1960s it was Europe's leading supplier of land-based gas turbines. It introduced Dry Low Emission (DLE) combustion technology in the mid 1990s becoming market leaders.
The initiation of the production and design of gas turbines was largely due to Bob Feilden OBE (1917–2004) who joined the company in 1946. Gas turbines were first produced in 1952.
The Beevor Foundry on Beevor Street was opened in 1950 by General Sir William Joseph Slim (later Field Marshal William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim), and claimed to be the biggest foundry in Europe.
In the 1950s, it was producing one turbine a fortnight. The company sold its 1000th gas turbine in July 1977. It won the MacRobert Award in December 1983 for the Tornado gas turbine. The company's Cambridge-educated Egyptian chairman, Dr Waheeb Rizk OBE, was concurrently President of the IMechE from 1984-5 and also President of the International Council on Combustion Engines from 1973-77. He was Managing Director from 1971–83 and developed the W layout for gas turbine power stations that were used as emergency generating stations for the National Grid, also known as peaking power plants. These had to be developed due to prolonged electricity blackouts in south-east England in 1961 caused by cascading failure. It built the first gas turbine to burn North Sea gas, for the Eastern Gas Board in Watford. In 1981 it won an order to power the Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhgorod pipeline (Trans-Siberian Pipeline).
Research work was done in conjunction with the University of Sussex and with Cranfield University in the 1980s, where extensive development was undertaken of the combustion chamber and of the gallery to the turbine.
Read more about this topic: Ruston (engine Builder)
Famous quotes containing the word gas:
“Shielded, what sorts of life are stirring yet:
Legs lagged like drains, slippers soft as fungus,
The gas and grate, the old cold sour grey bed.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)