Enhanced Efficiency Steam Turbine Blading - Cleaner Coal Plant

Abstract:

This document is a summary report for the project titled 'Enhanced Efficiency Steam Turbine Blading - For Cleaner Coal Plant'.

The aim of this project was to increase the efficiency of the short height stages typically found in high pressure steam turbine cylinders. For coal fired power plant, this will directly lead to a reduction in the amount of fuel required to produce electrical power, resulting in lower power station emissions. The continual drive towards higher cycle efficiencies demands increased inlet steam temperatures and pressures, which necessarily leads to shorter blade heights. Further advances in blading for short height stages are required in order to maximise the benefit. To achieve this, an optimisation of existing 3 dimensional designs was carried out and a new 3 dimensional fixed blade for use in the early stages of the high pressure turbine was developed.

The milestones for the project were defined around the following specific objectives:

The work that CCLRC undertook on the ALSTOM C.F.D. code was very successful. The 3-D flow solver code supplied by ALSTOM was analysed and two methods of parallisation implemented. The OMP method of parallisation is only suitable for use on "shared memory" multi-processor computers. The MPI method of parallisation is suitable for use on "distributed memory" computers, sometimes know as "Beowulf Clusters", which tend to be significantly cheaper to buy than large shared memory computers of similar processing power. As a result of this work, ALSTOM Power have purchased a Beowulf Cluster, and it has become the main workhorse of the Aerodynamics Group.

1. Introduction
2. Analysis of the Project
3. Improved Computational Grid Generation
4. Optimisation of Current Controlled Flow Design
5. Development of Very Short Height Fixed Blades
6. Improved Methods for Producing Model Turbine Components
7. Model Turbine Test of Very Short Height Fixed Blade
8. Summary and Conclusions

Publication Year:

2005

Publisher:

Department of Trade and Industry

DOI:

No DOI minted

Author(s):

Fowler, A, Bell, D, Cao, C, Fowler, R, Oliver, P, Greenough, C & Timmis, P