Gas Turbines

Steam and Gas Turbine Turbine work Combine:

Sir Charles Parsons built the first steam turbine used in a power station in Cambridge, England. Charles Curtis (US) develops a different design and sells the patent to E.W. Rice at General Electric. Rice gives Curtis all the manpower and resources he needs to develop the worlds most powerful steam turbines which are commercially sold across the continent. Dr. Sanford Moss develops a thesis on gas turbines in 1903, he joins GE in Massachusetts. Moss Develops the superturbocharger during World War 1. This device uses hot exhaust gases from an internal combustion engine to drive a turbine wheel which ran a centrifugal compressor. This device increased the power output of the engine. In 1918 GE begins a gas turbine division. This sets the stage for GE to lead the commercial gas turbine industry decades later. Dr. A. A. Griffith develops vital theories regarding gas flow past airfoils vs the previous method of using passages.

Gas Turbine Development at General Electric
by Arne Loft

Bruce Buckland started with GE in August, 1923 and retired in 1966 after 42 years service. He was instrumental in designing many of the early gas turbines that established GE as one of the leading suppliers of gas turbines. The first half of his working career was in the steam turbine business and the second half in gas turbine design. The following information was extracted from a taped interview with Bruce in 1980:

About 1937 the GE Locomotive and Car Equipment Division in Erie, PA wanted the company to design and manufacture an engine for their locomotives rather than buy somebody’s diesel engine. A. R. Smith, who was then head of the Turbine Engineering Group responded by organizing a team of people in the Steam Turbine Engineering Section, including Kenny Salisbury, Alan Howard, Gene Huntsiger, Larry LaReque, to study the possibilities. Studies were interrupted in 1941 as a result of a meeting of Alex Stevenson and Glen Warren with Dr. Durand, head of the N.A.C.A. (Predecessor of NASA), at which time GE was told to lay aside their plans for a locomotive engine and turn their attention to aircraft engines. During this period Roy Schultz and Colonel Don Kern, who were in England investigating the Whittle jet engine, had made arrangements to send a sample Whittle engine to the supercharger group.

Dr. Sanford Moss had continued the supercharger research in Lynn, MA after World War I, consequently Lynn had a good supercharger department which supplies type B superchargers in almost all of the Bombers and other aircraft used in WWII. The Lynn Department was given instructions to develop a Whittle-type jet engine. The result was the I-16 with 1600 pounds of thrust and used to power the Bell XP-59. The I-40 was the next jet engine design with 4000 pounds of thrust. Both engine design activities were very secret in the early stages.

Meanwhile, Alan Howard and his group designed the TG-100, a prop-jet that developed 2000 horsepower driving the propeller and approximately 500 horsepower in the jet. First flight was in the XP-81 Orion aircraft which had a TG-100 in the nose driving a propeller and an I-40 jet in the tail. Removing the prop and doubling the size of the TG-100 produced an axial flow, pure jet engine design: the TG-180, with 4000 pounds of thrust. It was about this time in 1944 that Bruce was assigned to the project to test the TG-180, which was built in Schenectady. Later, the TG-180 powered the P-84, P-86, B-45 and B-47.

The locomotive engine design was restarted in mid-1946 and tested in Bldg. 49 the next year. This was followed by tests with the locomotive in Erie, during which several design problems were discovered, including fatigue failure of the second stage bucket within the first three hundred hours of operation. After completion of locomotive tests in Erie and some initial runs on the Nickel Plate and Pennsylvania Railroads, the locomotive unit was loaned to Union Pacific. Union Pacific ran it for about one year between Cheyenne and Los Angeles before ordering 20 units in February 1952, primarily for hauling freight. By that time GE had manufactured two Bangor, two Central Vermont, and one Central Maine locomotive. This was followed by shipping the first gas turbine for utility use to Texas Power and Light in late 1952, the MS3001. GE then sold 20 units of the new two-shaft version, pipeline gas. By December 1979, one of these units at the Pecos River Station completed 200,000 hours of service, prompting Howard Perry to celebrate the event by organizing a party in El Paso. Meanwhile, GE started to receive orders for many “gas pumpers”.

In the early 1950’s GE provided 10 gas turbine/compressor drives to Creole Petroleum to pressurize an oil formation a mile below the surface of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. This was the first time anybody had put such a station seven or eight miles from shore in a lake. It was very successful. The ten gas turbines and compressors were mounted on a platform approximately two football fields in size and supported by 364 reinforced concrete piles, about one meter square and 120 feet long, with the lower half to the mud and the upper half in the lake and over the surface.

During this same period, gas turbines had problems burning Bunker “C” fuel. At the end of a six-month test period GE developed a de-salting scheme using DeLaval centrifuging equipment to remove the sodium and add magnesium to inhibit the vanadium corrosion. This resulted in an ash that shucked itself off at shut-down and proved to be a satisfactory solution provided that the turbine was operated for intermittent service periods.

Meanwhile, Union Pacific was still looking for a bigger gas turbine to replace their 9000 HP diesels. Erie locomotive personnel theorized that the proper size for a locomotive prime mover was 4500 HP and, if more power was required, the turbines should be stacked in a row, similar to the diesels. However, Schenectady quoted an 8500 HP gas turbine in 1952/1953 and Union Pacific ordered 30 units. This was a courageous design in that it had a long span with only two support bearings. In addition there was an axial flow resonance and some of the machines “on test” shed buckets and suffered dynamic component failures, resulting in a great many problems. These were successfully cleaned up, including early wheel failures which were overcome by developing a method of hot-stretching and cold-proof testing the turbine wheels which is still used today.

However, the gas turbines were costing more than the market price and, in the early 60’s, two concepts were adopted in order to reduce the total cost: (1) Enclose the turbine in a packaged powerplant and (2) Advance order to achieve a six-month delivery cycle (like to competition) instead of one year. Fortunately for GE, the big blackout of 1965 in the New York area occurred at this time and one of the Long Island Light and Power Utility gas turbines picked up the system from a “black start”. This event, coupled with solving the technical problems with the Frame 5 design was the impetus needed to turn the business around and is considered the turning point in the gas turbine business.

Special thanks to Arne Loft for this section. Join the Edison Tech Center team as a volunteer and make your own piece of engineering history known.