This is an excerpt from the Siemens Blog. You can read the full version here.
Originally written By Erik Munktell on January 14, 2021
Listening to the turbine experts: a review of 2020
Can a turbine simulation save the planet? One simulation alone is not enough. But one simulation with that intent can inspire other engineers and researchers to do the same. This butterfly effect is happening today in turbine design.
I live in Sweden, the same country as Greta Thunberg. Her message is that we must act now to save the planet. For a long time, Sweden’s electricity has come mainly from Hydropower and Nuclear power. But lately a lot of focus has still been on building wind and solar power plants. Here in Sweden we also have more trees being grown than being cut down. As a result we are close to being carbon negative, transportation and industry included.
With this country-wide energy focus friends often ask me why I work with gas turbines. Surely, they are not needed? I rarely get them to listen to my answer for more than a few minutes, as in my enthusiasm it quickly gets technical! But in short – I do it to save the planet. Or rather, we do it to save the planet. Because I am not alone in this effort. Many people work on making turbines run more efficiently, with fewer – or even no – polluting emissions. We can’t do everything by ourselves, but our work can inspire others and together we can create a clean energy future.
My small part in this plan is to make sure the actual makers of gas turbines have the best tools in the world for designing new and better electricity generating or flight enabling propulsion products. In this blog, I take a look at the many ways we saw in 2020 that turbine companies are using our simulation tools to do just that.