A Look Inside a Busted Gas Turbine

I was touring a 300 megawatt natural gas combined-cycle power plant last year, when my friend mentioned that one of the turbines had been replaced due to damage. “Oh – what happened?” As it turns out, the engineer who was testing the turbine began spinning it up without checking the lubrication – which was non-existent. Once the RPMs got high enough, the ball bearings couldn’t take the friction and melted away, leaving the rotor to rattle around on its shaft and the blades to scrape against the casing. Insurance paid for the replacement, while the engineer managed to keep his job – and get schooled.





ouch:



The blades are made from single-crystal nickel superalloys with a thermal barrier coating. Rolls Royce has some interesting exploded diagrams and time-lapse construction videos of their jet engines (which are based on very similar technology) here. Single crystals have found other applications in clean energy – from silicon wafers for solar cells to massive, fast-growing KDP crystals for fusion at the National Ignition Facility.