Pennsylvania State START lab wins $6M for national experimental turbine
The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab, together with collaborating partners, last week awarded Pennsylvania State’s Steady Thermal Aero Research Turbine (START) Lab $6 million to create a National Experimental Turbine (NExT) rig they hope will modernize the U.S. energy infrastructure.
Data presented at the 2019 American Society of Mechanical Engineers TurboExpo showed that advancements in this area could add as much as $7 billion of economic benefit to the nation while removing up to 2 million cars worth of CO2 from the road. Opening gas turbine markets for aviation and power generation applications could bring more than $4.5 trillion in potential revenue over the next 20 years, and combined cycle gas turbine plants are expected to supply around 60 percent of new power generation capacity through 2035.
“This project is truly a new frontier,” said Karen Thole, director of the START Lab, mechanical engineering department head and principal investigator of the project. “While most turbine geometries are highly proprietary, the goal for NExT is to provide a modern turbine design that can be used by several organizations. This collaboration will lead to higher-efficiency engines. The experiments and data from NExT will help our industry partners design more cost-effective and environmentally-conscious gas turbines.”
Sustainability and security will be the key takeaways from the new design. NExT will be a turbine testing platform focused on advancing U.S.-specific technology. To do this, it will work with four turbine manufacturers — Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, Solar, and Siemens — as well as Agilis, a turbine design firm. Because of this, the rig will also have a common design that will be adaptable to the advancement of any collaborating companies’ turbines.
“This is an important and exciting project,” said Richard A. Dennis, technology manager of the Advanced Turbines Program in the Office of Fossil Energy at the DOE-National Energy Technology Laboratory. “START and the NExt initiative will advance turbine technology, develop new instrumentation, and create high-fidelity analytical data sets. These data sets will support the development of computational models, machine learning, and deepen our understanding of turbine performance.”
