Gas Turbine Powerhouse

Dietrich Eckardt

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110369380
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Thermodynamics

This book tells the story of the power generation gas turbine from the perspective of one of the leading companies in the field over a period of nearly 100 years, written by an engineer. Especially in times of imminent global economic crises it appears to be worthwhile to reflect on real economic values based on engineering ingenuity and enduring management of technological leadership.

Though the book is primarily designed as a technical history of the BBC/ABB/Alstom power generation gas turbines, its scope is sufficiently broad to cover general development trends, including parallel competitor activities. A special benefit is the historical breakdown to the gas turbine component level, so that the book actually outlines the development of axial compressors from early beginnings, the progress in combustion technology towards extraordinary low emission values and that of axial turbines with special emphasis on early turbine cooling innovations. The sheer length of certain engineering developments over several decades allows interesting historic observations and deductions on inherent business mechanisms, the effects of technology preparations and organisational consequences. A look into the mirror of the past provides revelations on the impact of far-reaching business decisions.

2017 Winner of the Historian Engineer Award of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers

The writing of history, historiography,

is the ‘doing of history’, and engineers

should make sure that the historiography

of engineering is not left entirely to historians.

Recognition of this activity by the profession is very important.¹

1 Introduction

This book tells the story of the power generation gas turbine (GT) from the perspective of one of the leading companies in the field over a period of more than 100 years and written by an engineer. With a global economic crisis imminent – triggered and accompanied by virtual stock market bonanzas and a few years after the illusions of a ‘new economy’ visibly failed – the time has come to reflect on real economic values based on engineering ingenuity and enduring management of technological leadership. For more than 120 years, engineers of the Swiss development centre of A.-G. Brown Boveri & Cie., ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. from 1988 and Alstom Power Ltd. in Baden, Switzerland (CH) since 2000 have significantly contributed to the art of thermal turbomachinery design in general.

In the history of energy conversion, the gas turbine is relatively new. The first utility gas turbine to generate electricity at Neuchâtel², Switzerland ran at full power at Baden, CH on 7 July 1939³ and was developed by Brown Boveri. The scope of this book starts somewhat earlier to explain influencing ideas and consequently foregoing developments contributing to this invention. It then describes the steady and impressive engine growth from the first local 4 MW emergency power unit until present-day advanced configurations that generate power for large metropolitan areas with unit sizes above 300 MW. This was no success story throughout, especially not in view of the actual business fortunes achieved. There were changes in the company affiliations of the various branches, changes in product portfolio and also some development dead ends. But a few of the original BBC product lines managed to stay in the frontline of advanced superior technology even from present global perspective.

In the meantime, the sheer duration of certain engineering developments over several decades allows interesting historic observations and deductions on inherent business mechanisms, the effects of technology preparations and organisational consequences. A look into the past bears revelations on the impact of far-reaching business decisions. The positive influence of strong, courageous and visionary personalities becomes visible to the same extent as the negative consequences of hesitation and idle waiting. These prospects of an indepth review of its own historic background have led a number of companies to launch similar assessments. BBC started from a modest nucleus to become one of the largest engineering companies worldwide with operations in around 100 countries. In 1990, it had more than 220,000 employees under the label of ABB. The engineering conglomerate was and still is amazingly innovative and successful in a broad variety of engineering product ranges: DC and AC (direct and alternating current) motors, turbo-, diesel and water generators, transformers, high-voltage transmission and grid equipment, switches and relays, steam turbines for power and ship propulsion including related gearboxes, steam-generating Velox boilers and power generation gas turbines, electric and gas turbine drives up to and including complete railway and streetcar systems, turbocompressors for the iron and steel industry, but also for aero engine applications, turbochargers, wind turbines, electro boilers and furnaces, nuclear power plant equipment, high-frequency radio and telecommunication equipment, liquid-crystal displays, vacuum tubes and semiconductors, power plant controls – to name just the most important. These product ranges comprise development activities as well as manufacturing and service operations in general.

Only one of these areas found comprehensive documentation in a stand-alone book so far: The BBC Turbocharger⁴. In 2002 an ASME paper⁵ with a review of ‘ABB/BBC Historical Firsts’ in advanced gas turbine technology got some attention. It was then indeed Ernst Jenny, the author of the successful turbocharger book who became a strong proponent of the idea to write a follow-on history of gas turbine development⁶. Industry history, especially that of Germany and Switzerland in the context of the 2^nd World War, received the special attention of professional young historians in recent years. We owe them many fundamental clarifications and also sometimes rare technical ‘golden nuggets’ as a result of their unrelenting, in-depth ploughing through archive materials. When it comes to the technical interpretation of their findings, pure historians sometimes reach their limits, however. In line with this thinking Werner Albring⁷, the ‘nestor’ of German fluid mechanics at TU Dresden for years provided strong encouragement to this project.

In fact, this is not the first approach to the subject. Our files contain a collection of material for a ‘Swiss History of the Turbomachinery Industry’ which was obviously planned in 1978/79, but the idea was dropped with the disruption of the BST industrial venture⁸ at that time.

As had already been reported in the addressed ASME paper⁵, one of the most intriguing aspects of the early BBC gas turbine history is the frequent in-depth involvement in parallel aero engine developments. Correspondingly, astonishing findings were made in the meantime as a consequence of further investigations and they would disrupt in full breadth the general scope of this stationary GT company history. A full roll-out has to wait for a follow-on publication.

Figure 1-1 Survey of the book structure

Figure 1-1 illustrates the structure of this book in graphic form. The left-hand scale covers the period from the formation of BBC until today, with the various Company names shown over time in the next column. The history of this succession of companies from BBC Brown, Boveri & Cie. via ABB Power Generation Ltd. to the present ALSTOM will be told in Section 2. Sections 3 to 6 in principle follow the chronology, with a few exceptions. Section 3 outlines in short the centuries of collecting experience in turbomachinery, a description that normally starts with the introduction of the reaction principle by Heron of Alexandria. I tried not to follow the trodden path and looked for some lesser known examples with reference to the gas turbine and the Swiss location.

Edward Constant⁹, the author of one of the most comprehensive and well-researched books on GT history, differentiates between a first, aborted gas turbine revolution (1900-1920, Stolze, Armengaud) and a second, successful attempt, mainly led by BBC in the 1930s.

I have maintained this structure in Section 3, where all ‘early attempts with the GT principle’ belong to the first category. Section 4 describes the path to the 1^st power generation gas turbine at Brown Boveri, Baden, Switzerland in the timeframe from approx. 1927 until 1945. Besides a description of the actual development activities, the text focuses on the decisive component for the GT development success: the axial flow compressor. This principle of a combined chronological and subject-oriented order has been carried through in the following sections. In Section 5, the GT’s ‘middle component’ – the combustion chamber – has been linked to the development period for the BBC gas turbines between 1945 and 1988, the end of BBC as an independent, stand-alone company after 97 years. The narration about the 3^rd GT component along the flow path – the cooled turbine – then follows in Section 6 in the context of the most recent technology breakthrough – the success of the combined-cycle power plants after 1990. This presentation has a certain benefit, since the individual GT component histories are kept together, letting the inherent development rationale become more transparent. Moreover, with a few exceptions, like e.g. the first introduction of a transonic compressor design in the 1980s, this deliberately chosen structure fits the development highlights touched on surprisingly well:

• – The successful realisation of the axial compressor was the precondition for the BBC success towards the 1^st utility gas turbine in the 1930s. Vice versa, the lack of an efficient compressor unit was in most of the foregoing efforts the reason of failure.
• – The intermediate phase from 1945–1988 saw at its backend the breakthrough of BBC’s unique low-emission combustion technology.
• – Finally, the highly demanding, integrated turbine designs with the combination of advanced aerothermodynamics and sophisticated production technology only materialised after 1990; but they also triggered reflections on the recently rediscovered, early beginnings of BBC’s turbine blade cooling technology in the 1930s.

Besides this repetitive link of section headings/contents and the 3 key GT components in the core Sections 4 to 6, each of these chapters with varying emphasis contains a treatise of

• – the developments during that period,
• – the relevant organisational changes,
• – the most prominent, dominant engineering personalities,
• – the relevant market observations and – where applicable
• – the competitive developments.

In a short final Section 7 ‘Les Palmarès’, the historical ‘firsts’ in power generation technology by BBC/ABB and Alstom are listed in chronological order, together with a list of the responsible GT Development Directors in Baden, CH during the covered period of nearly 90 years and of the dedicated members of the GT Development ‘Hall of Fame’ which since 1995 is awarded annually for individual, outstanding contributions to the gas turbine development activities.

This book is written to be read from start to finish as a continuous story, once in a while interspersed by summarising description and analysis. Details and lengthier excursions have been shifted to the Footnotes on the same page, where the patient reader may find a few ‘nuggets’. I hope that the interaction of the various elements of the story as described above will not confuse but rather enlighten the readers together with the presumed advantages as the narrative proceeds. References to the used literature have been collected in the comprehensive Section 8 ‘Bibliography’.

On the other hand, anyone who prefers to use the book as a kind of reference is recommended to turn to the Index listings – of Names, Section 9 and of Subjects, Section 10. Section 11 shall assist understanding with a comprehensive list of used ‘Nomenclature and Abbreviations’, followed finally by Section 12 – a short portrait of ‘The Author’.

At the end of these introductory remarks, special thanks go to Juerg Schmidli and Peter Rufli from Alstom Power, Gas Turbine Development in Baden, Switzerland for defining frame and pace of this project in a generous manner. This work was considerably facilitated by a thorough preparation of the relevant, notwithstanding huge literature body for this task. The Alstom-internal database ‘GT History References’ in the meantime covers nearly 1’200 objects (papers, journal articles, books) that have been collected, digitised and put into a searchable form by Robert Marmilic, who herewith prepared the reliable foundation of this project. The numeration of this database is also given in the attached Bibliography in brackets […], as an extra-benefit for Alstom-internal readers. Several colleagues contributed extensively from their own broad development experiences and by carrying out a careful proof reading of the manuscript. Mrs. Joanna Stone helped to smooth the English text and so considerably alleviated the ‘readability’ of engineering explanations; the endeavour to produce English technical diction was followed in the tradition of former, internationally established house publications such as ‘Brown Boveri Review’. Special thanks are owed to Claude Seippel’s son Olivier (1926–2012), also employed in various functions at BBC, who helped to revive personal memories of his father, especially by providing insight into the BBC part of Cl. Seippel’s diary notes.

Invaluably, the great resources of the ABB Historic Archive, Baden-Daettwil, CH (Docuteam Tobias Wildi, Mrs. Raffaela Luetolf and Norbert Lang) and of the ABB ZX Test Dept. Archive (Bernhard Schoenung, Hueseyin Coskun) have been made available for these studies – with thanks to ABB HR Management (Renato Merz, Volker Stephan). Mrs. Cornelia Bodmer maintained contact to the ETHZ Library, squeezing rare information sources out of NEBIS¹⁰. What could not be made available in Switzerland was still in reach of the everready specialists of the MTU Aero Engines, Information Services team in Munich, Germany (Helmut Schubert, Reinhard Glander, Mrs. Sabine Hechtl), in the meantime probably the best-assorted library for gas turbine and turbomachinery issues in Europe. The powerhouse graphic¹¹ on the book cover is by, and courtesy of Mark Welsh, J...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Survey
• 3 Gas Turbine Forerunners
• 4 The Path to the First Power Generation Gas Turbine, 1927–1945
• 5 Gas Turbine Technology Development 1945–1988
• 6 Combined Cycle Power Plants – GT Technology Breakthroughs since the 1990s
• 7 ‘Les Palmarès’
• 8 Bibliography
• 9 Index of Names
• 10 Subject Index
• 11 Nomenclature and Abbreviations
• 12 The Author