User-Oriented Gas Turbine Research at KEMA

In the 80’s and early 90’s, in the Netherlands 11 combi blocks with prefitted gas turbines have been built. This repowering programme increased the efficiency of the units involved by several percentage points. Additionally, the commissioning of the five 335 MWe units at the Eems power station is in progress and plans exist for a farther seven 250 MW heat and power stations. This means that by 2002 the generating industry will be operating seventy-five gas turbines with a total gas turbine power of 5700 MWe. These data serve to illustrate mat gas turbines will be the workhorse of the Dutch generating industry in the coming decades, and that security of supply, efficiency, emissions and generating cost will to a large extent be determined by the gas turbine. However, the introduction of the gas turbine, driven by the possibility of high-efficiency electricity generation in e.g. combined cycle units, the increase in scale of the machines and the fact that they are increasingly being used in base load units have also led to problems and forced unavailability, as will be shown under goals of the project. The problems are related to creep, thermal stresses and fatigue of combustion chambers, turbine rotor blades, rotors etc. Apart from these problem areas, other subjects of interest are optimization of inlet air filtering and compressor cleaning. It is the Dutch Electricity Production industry who realized that a substantial R&D effort is necessary to solve those user related problems and formulated the execution of the target project Gas Turbines.