Introduction to Gas Turbines for Non Engineers（介绍燃气轮机为非工程师）.pdf

Introduction to Gas Turbines for Non- Engineers (Published in the Global Gas Turbine News, Volume 37: 1997, No. 2) by Lee S. Langston, University of Connecticut and George Opdyke, Jr., Dykewood Enterprises A turbine is any kind of spinning device that uses the action of a fluid to produce work. Typical fluids are: air, wind, water, steam and helium. Windmills and hydroelectric dams have used turbine action for decades to turn the core of an electrical generator to produce power for both industrial and residential consumption. Simpler turbines are much o lder, with the first known appearance dating to the time of ancient Greece. In the history of energy conversion, however, the gas turbine is relatively new. The first practical gas turbine used to generate electricity ran at Neuchatel, Switzerland in 1939, and was developed by the Brown Boveri Company. The first gas turbine powered airplane flight also took place in 1939 in Germany, using the gas turbine developed by Hans P. von Ohain. In England, the 1930s’ invention and development of the aircraft gas turbine by Frank Whittle resulted in a similar British flight in 1941. Figure 1. Schematic for a) an aircraft jet engine; and b) a land-based gas turbine The name gas turbine is somewhat misleading, because to many it implies a turbine engine that uses gas as its fuel. Actually a gas turbine (as shown schematically in Fig. 1) has a compressor to draw in and compress gas (most usually air); a combustor (or burner) to add fuel to heat the compressed air; and a turbine to extract power from the hot air flow. The gas turbine is an internal combustion (IC) engine employing a continuous combustion process. This differs from the intermittent combustion occurring in Diesel and automoti ve IC engines. Because