Germany: Siemens Building Test Center for Gas Turbines

Siemens is building a new combustion test center for gas turbines near Berlin.

“We are investing 66 million euros to be able to study and validate the combustion processes in gas turbines in our own test center. That will enable us to build even more efficient gas power plants,” says Roland Fischer, CEO of the Fossil Power Generation Division within the Siemens Energy Sector. The test center is to commence operation in 2014 on a 36,000 square meter site recently purchased by Siemens Real Estate in Ludwigsfelde, about 15 kilometers south of Berlin.

The planned test center in Ludwigsfelde will play an important role in the design and ongoing development of Siemens gas turbines. “The combustion processes going on inside gas turbines at temperatures of 1,500 degrees centigrade and higher make extreme demands on the materials. Combustion is the key to even higher efficiency in gas turbines, but there are limits to our ability to simulate it on a computer,” explains Fischer. Up to now, Siemens has relied on external test facilities in evolving its gas turbine burners. In the future the company will be able run more tests, as in-house trials will no longer be dependent on the availability of external capacities.

The new test center is to have three cells for investigating combustion processes under real-life service conditions. In a gas turbine, natural gas or fuel oil is mixed with air under high pressure and combusted in up to 24 identical burners. Gas power plants can be started up very quickly and are highly versatile in on-line operation, but the conditions of the combustion processes under part and full load differ significantly. In the tests, various parameters such as output, efficiency, emissions and the stability of the flame are studied on a single burner on the test bed. The Ludwigsfelde site has access to an adequate supply of natural gas via a local pipeline and is also connected to the high-voltage power grid. What is more, natural gas and fuel oil can be substituted in the combustion trials by mixtures of alternative fuels such as hydrogen, ethane, propane and butane. As a leading provider of modern gas turbines, Siemens holds the world efficiency record with a proven efficiency of 60.75 percent in combined-cycle operation. In a combined cycle power plant, the hot exhaust from a gas turbine is used to raise steam that drives a steam turbine to boost the overall power output.

The importance of Siemens Energy’s Berlin location is reflected in its recent investments. Just this year, the company spent 17 million euros on expanding and renovating its test facility in Berlin-Moabit, in which fully assembled gas turbines are tested under power plant conditions. A new drilling station for gas turbine casing parts has also been installed there at a cost of 13 million euros. In 2009 Siemens invested 42 million euros in a new production shop for gas turbine blades. Two new production shops are also being built as part of a refurbishment program costing around 30 million euros in Siemens’ Berlin switchgear plant, which manufactures components for power plants and high-voltage networks. Just last year Siemens inaugurated a new logistics center for gas turbine parts in Ludwigsfelde, in the immediate vicinity of the future combustion test center.

High-efficiency gas turbines and combined cycle power plants are part of Siemens’ Environmental Portfolio. In fiscal 2011, revenue from the Portfolio totaled about €30 billion, making Siemens one of the world’s largest suppliers of ecofriendly technologies. In the same period, their products and solutions enabled customers to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 320 million tons, an amount equal to the total annual CO2 emissions of Berlin, Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, New York, Singapore and Tokyo.

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LNG World News Staff, December 16, 2011