Applications
By far the most important use of gas turbines is in aviation, where they provide the motive power for jet propulsion. Because of the significance of this application and the diversity of modern jet engines, the subject will be dealt with at length in a separate section of the article. The present discussion will touch on the use of gas turbines in electric power generation and in certain industrial processes, as well as consider their role in marine, locomotive, and automotive propulsion.
Electric power generation
In the field of electric power generation, gas turbines must compete with steam turbines in large central power stations and with diesel engines in smaller plants. Even though the initial cost of a gas turbine is less than either alternative for moderately sized units, its inherent efficiency is also lower. Yet, a gas-turbine unit requires less space, and it can be placed on-line within minutes, as opposed to a steam unit that requires many hours for start-up. As a consequence, gas-turbine engines have been widely used as medium-sized “peak load” plants to run intermittently during short durations of high power demand on an electric system. In this case, initial costs, rather than fuel charges, become the prime consideration.
Early commercial stationary plants employed aircraft units operating at reduced turbine-inlet temperatures. The high rotational speed of aircraft turbines required special gearing to drive electric generators. More recently, special units have been designed for direct operation (in the United States) at 3,600 revolutions per minute. Units in sizes up to 200,000 kilowatts have been built, although the majority of installations are less than 100,000 kilowatts. These turbines have operated up to 6,000 hours per year on either liquid fuels or natural gas. Typical turbine-inlet temperatures for large units range from about 980° to 1,260° C with turbine blade cooling used at the higher temperatures.
Efficiency can be improved by adding a regenerator to exploit the high turbine exhaust temperatures (typically about 480° to 590° C). Alternatively, if the gas turbine serves as a peak-load unit for a continuously running steam power plant, the hot exhaust gases can be used to preheat by means of a heat exchanger the combustion air entering a steam boiler. A modern development involves feeding the gas turbine exhaust directly into a steam generator where additional fuel is burned, producing steam of moderate pressure for a steam turbine. An overall thermal efficiency of nearly 50 percent is claimed for these combined units, making them the most fuel-efficient power plants currently available.
Industrial uses
With sizes typically ranging from 1,000 to 50,000 horsepower, industrial gas-turbine engines can be used for many applications. These include driving compressors for pumping natural gas through pipelines, where a small part of the pumped gas serves as the fuel. Such units can be automated so that only occasional on-site supervision is required. A gas turbine can also be incorporated in an oil refining process called the Houdry process, in which pressurized air is passed over a catalyst to burn off accumulated carbon. The hot gases then drive a turbine directly without a combustion chamber. The turbine, in turn, drives a compressor to pressurize the air for the process. Small portable gas turbines with centrifugal compressors also have been used to operate pumps.
Marine propulsion
In this area of application, the gas-turbine engine has two advantages over steam- and diesel-driven plants: it is lightweight and compact. During the early 1970s a ship powered by a gas turbine capable of 20,000 horsepower was successfully tested at sea by the U.S. Navy over a period of more than 5,000 hours. Gas turbines were subsequently selected to power various new U.S. naval vessels.
Locomotive propulsion
During the 1950s and ’60s, manufacturers of locomotives built a number of vehicles powered by gas-turbine engines that use heavy oil. Although gas-turbine locomotives have had moderate success for long sustained runs, they have not been able to make significant inroads against diesel locomotives under normal running conditions, especially after increases in the relative cost of heavy fuel oils. Moreover, the inherent low efficiency of a simple open-cycle gas turbine becomes even worse at part-load or during idling when considerable fuel is needed to drive the compressor while producing little or no useful power.
Automotive propulsion
Gas-turbine engines were proposed for use in automobiles from the early 1960s. In spite of their small size and weight for a given power output and their low exhaust emissions compared to gasoline engines, the disadvantages of high manufacturing costs, low thermal efficiency, and poor part-load and idling performance have proven gas-turbine cars to be uneconomical and impractical.