Friday 29 Mar 2024
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Some 680,000 homes in Bouchain, northern France, is powered by the world’s most efficient combined-cycle power plant. Endorsed by the Guinness World Records, the plant’s beating heart – an advanced GE gas turbine – can convert more than 62 percent of fuel energy into electricity. For the power-generation crowd, that’s like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon.

This record-breaking GE turbine produces hot air at a speed of a category-5 hurricane.

The turbine – called 9HA.01 in GE nomenclature – can go from zero to full throttle in under 30 minutes, enabling the plant operator, EDF Energy, to quickly respond to changing demand and supply customers with power from intermittent sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar.

It’s also very clean, it has been calculated by the engineers at GE to produce only 6.3 fluid ounces of pollution – slightly more than half a can of soda – after burning 3.3 tonnes of natural gas mixed with air.

This is possible because the turbine operates at temperatures approaching the melting point of steel. The engineers modelled the heat flows inside on a powerful supercomputer and used designs, materials and special thermal barrier coatings developed for jet engines to handle the temperature. The hot air comes out at a speed approaching a Category-5 hurricane, which can fill the Goodyear Blimp in 10 seconds.

“A 1,000-megawatt power plant using a pair of HA turbines could save $50 million on fuel over 10 years by raising efficiency by 1 percent,” said GE’s John Lammas, Chief Technology Officer for GE Power and Vice President of Gas Power Technology, who helped create the new gas turbine.

Lammas said the exact efficiency at Bouchain is 62.22 percent, beating the previous record of 61.5 percent. He said they were now testing technologies to hit the 65 percent mark.

“It takes about a decade of development to increase efficiency by 1 percent. It took us only 36 months to develop the HA turbine and about six years in total to get to where we are today with the Bouchain plant, and in this time, we went from under 60 percent to more than 62 percent in efficiency,” he said.

They are now testing technologies to hit the 65 percent efficiency mark, having developed a material called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) that is very light but also tough and heat resistant. 

“GE Aviation is already using it inside jet engines and they built plant for mass-production of parts from CMCs. Our components are much larger, and we want to learn from them,” he said.

Lammas, who started at GE as an aviation engineer, had previously worked on the GE90 jet engine, which is still the most powerful jet engine ever built. It’s also in the Guinness World Records and powers many Boeing 777 jets.

“The team that worked on the aerodynamics are part of GE Aviation. You hear the CEO Jeff Immelt talk about the GE Store, the sharing of know-how by businesses inside the company. This is a perfect example. We also borrowed compressor technology from GE Oil & Gas. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to move so fast. Remember, we built this machine in just three years,” he said.

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