Below is a case study from the paper, \"Babbitted bearing health assessment,\" by John Whalen of John Crane, Thomas Hess of Dupont Engineering, Jim Allen of Nova Chemicals, and Jack Craighton of Dupont Engineering at the 41st Turbomachinery Symposium in Houston, Texas. The case study involves a large centrifugal compressor in charge gas service in an ethylene plant. The unit was running fine when a power outage shut the plant down. The train came down fine but when brought back up it was noted that one bearing exhibited high levels of vibration.

Siemens plans to divest its solar business activities and is currently holding talks with potential buyers on this subject. Siemens intends to focus its renewable energy activities on wind and hydro power. As part of this reorganization, the Energy Sector will be slimmed down and the Solar & Hydro Division will be discontinued. Strengthening the company’s focus on core activities is one of the five main points of the new company program 2014, the broad outline of which was recently announced to the public.  

At its management conference in Berlin, Siemens AG presented the basic structure of its new company-wide program to some 600 top executives. The emphasis on cost cutting and organizational restructuring has led to fears over job losses across divisions. But Siemens executives promise that the new program's goal is not to cut jobs.

  The 2012 Turbo Symposium took place in Houston in September with attendance up slightly on last year, according to Dr. Dara Childs, Director of Texas A& M’s Turbomachinery Laboratory which organizes the event. Consisting of technical sessions, a large exhibit hall and short courses, it attracts the main players in the oil & gas field each year.

In a paper, "Buying and Selling #1," authors Harry Miller and James Soroakes of Dresser-Rand and Michael Drosjack, a consultant, outline the challenging operating conditions encountered by today's compressors.

John Badini and Paul Brown of FS-Elliott presented a paper at the last (40th) Turbomachinery Symposium on "Guidelines for reducing the noise level of a centrifugal compressor installation." Below are some of the recommended best practices.

  Benefits of supercritical CO2 (SCO2) turbines: Simple cycle efficiency above 50%; footprints one hundredth of those of traditional turbomachinery for the same power output; and no nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions.

Who says coal is dead? While it may be currently struggling to compete against gas and wind generation in North America, coal power accounts for over 50 per cent of new build projects worldwide. Two-thirds of these coal power plant projects are located in Asia, but in Eastern Europe steam and steam turbine technology continue to play a major role in driving economic growth.

Gearboxes are widely used to reduce or increase the speed of prime movers to match them to driven machinery. Especially in critical operations where redundant equipment is not installed, the gearbox is as important to reliability as any other link in the power train. Yet many engineers tend to be more interested in the gas turbines, electric motors, compressors, and pumps than in the gearbox.

All turbomachinery is subject to degradation that, over time, will affect the system’s efficiency and operational performance. Precise monitoring of turbo machinery performance with continuous torque-monitoring systems can be used to identify gradual efficiency loss, allowing a more focused maintenance scope to be developed to return the system to its optimum operation and efficiency.

As the gas turbine morphs from a supplementary source of power to being increasingly responsible for baseload, the aftermarket has become more lucrative. Carlo Luzzatto, President of Chromalloy, estimated that the gas turbine (GT) service business amounts to somewhere around $16 to $17 billion per year. He qualified this by saying that this number may not include upgrades to turbines and replacements of the fleet, so the actual total may be as high as $20 billion annually.