FLUID HANDLING & FLUID POWER

A YEAR FOR PUMP DESIGN A company that engineers turbomachinery and markets engineering software says it has noted increasing demand for pumps and so has launched a year-long program devoted to pump design. The company, Concepts NREC, engineers and manufactures custom equipment, including pumps and instruments, and also sells a variety of engineering and manufacturing software for pumps and other turbomachinery under the brand name Agile. Nitin Jain, the director of marketing, said Concepts NREC is leveraging its engineering experience and software tools to present a series of design workshops on how to apply the companys software to design better pumps. The workshops constitute a program called Pump 2010 and are aimed at design engineers and original equipment manufacturers. The companys CEO, David Japikse, is a featured participant in the program. The schedule includes a pump diffuser design workshop on Jan. 20-22, a design software workshop on March 1-2, and a session on pump return channel and crossover design on March 3-5. Other workshops later in the year will address volute design and rapid manufacturing, advanced impeller design and economical machining, and issues of cavitation. A week-long workshop on advances in design, performance, and problem solving is set for August. The sessions will be held at Concepts NRECs headquarters in Wilder, Vt., Jain said. According to the company, the program is a response to an increase in demand for pumps. When it announced the program, the company quoted a report, World Pumps by the Freedonia Group, a market research firm based in Cleveland. According to the report, which was published in June 2008, Global demand for fluid handling pumps is forecast to increase at a 4.4 percent annual rate to $47 billion by 2012. Updates to the schedule, and information on registration and fees are available at the companys Web site,www.conceptsnrec.com.

COOLING ADVANCED AVIONICS AIRCRAFT ARE BECOMING INCREASINGLY SOPHISTICATED. Various flight systems are in development to deal with pilot fatigue, for instance, and to give planes new capabilities of control and performance. As desirable as the technologies are, they have a downside. They are all based on electronics that generate heat. Current cooling technologies are reaching their limits, and as thermal loads increase, todays cooling systems may be inadequate to keep future electronic circuits from failure through overheating. The U.S. Air Force is, of course, in the vanguard when it comes to pushing aircraft performance, so advancing thermal management technology to serve new and more complex planes is a serious issue. One of the ideas under investigation for thermal management is a system that uses vapor compression. This is the same idea of compressing and expanding a phase-changing fluid that makes an air conditioner or refrigerator work. The Air Force wants to see if a system using that principle can be developed for reliable operation in the harsh and rapidly changing environment of an airplane in flight. So the Air Force has awarded a contract to Mainstream Engineering Corp. of Rockledge, Fla., to develop a proof of concept for a vapor compression system to manage an aircrafts heat loads.

Increasingly sophisticated avionics are pushing the limits of current cooling

systems in aircraft. The U.S. Air Force is looking at a vapor compression system to deal with the heat.

Joseph Homitz, a mechanical engineer, is Mainstreams primary investigator for the project. Vapor-compression is appealing, he said, because it has high heat-transfer coefficients which lead to smaller heat exchangers, reduced flow rates, and lower power requirements. Current cooling systems on aircraft generally use a coolant that does not change phase. Homitz pointed out that some advanced aircraft have vapor compression systems installed, but they are used to cool the single-phase coolant. The aim of the project for the Air Force is to use a vapor compression system to cool the active devices directly. To make that practical, designers must first demonstrate that the system can adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of a plane during a mission, Homitz said. The heat load changes as devices switch on and off. The environment into which heat will be rejected changes at different altitudes and flight speeds. An air conditioner and refrigerator dont have to react to rapid and extreme changes in heat load or environmental conditions. Neither do the secondary vapor compression systems that are cooling a stream of primary coolant. The system we will be testing during the Phase I contract will be a subscale system to provide a proof of concept, Homitz told us. The thermal loads tested on this system will be representative of onboard thermal loads in terms of heat flux (amount of heat dissipated per unit area), overall heat dissipation, and required temperature. The representative loads include drawing heat from aircraft avionics, the cockpit, and high-heat-flux applications such as high-power electronics, he said. The main focus of the Phase I is to ensure that the systems can operate reliably, Homitz said. According to Homitz, The main design challenge is that the system will be reacting to changing temperatures over the course of a mission, and this affects how efficiently the system operates. As thermal loads cycle on and off during a mission, the system has to respond quickly if it is to successfully cool various devices and at the same time ensure proper fluid conditions at the inlet to the system compressor. He said that a proof of concept is expected to be complete this fall and that full-scale system developmenta working prototypeis estimated for late 2011. Deliverables for the Phase I are the bench-top experiment itself and data showing the systems performance. The prototype would be a flight-tested system packaged for a specific set of thermal loads, Homitz said.

MILESTONE FOR A TURBINE THE GAS TURBINE ENGINE THAT GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. SAYS IS ITS MOST POPULAR, THE LM2500, TURNED 40 THIS YEAR. The turbine began as an aeroderivative marine model and first put to sea in 1969 on a U.S. Merchant Marine supply ship, the GTS Admiral Wm. M. Callaghan. According to GE, the engine is in use today on about 400 ships in 30 navies. It is used on commercial ships as well. The Queen Mary II, possibly the most famous cruise ship today, carries two LM2500 engines, in addition to four diesels. The engine is also used in industry for power generation and mechanical drive applications like pipeline pumping. There are a total of 2,500 LM2500 turbines in service at sea and in industry, and GE says they have maintained a fleet reliability of 99.6 percent. The current power output of the LM2500 is rated at 33,600 shaft hp, or more than 25 megawatts. An advanced model, the LM2500+, is rated at 40,500 shp. GE reported in June that it had completed a qualification testing program for the most recent version, the LM2500+G4, and as a result, the engine has been certified by Bureau Veritas, RINA S.p.A., and the American Bureau of Shipping. The LM2500+G4 is rated at 47,370 shp. The power rating of the original LM2500s in the low 20,000s.

The LM2500, after 40 years of service, is GEs most successful gas turbine. Shown here are a turbine at a factory in Ohio (above) and the marine module that is supplied to the U.S. Navy (top).

The LM2500 is based on the design of the TF39 jet engine developed by GE for the U.S. Air Force in the late 60s. That design was later offered to the commercial aviation market as the CF6. According to GE, key features of the LM2500 design include a 16-stage axial flow compressor with approximately 18:1 pressure ratio with seven stages of variable stators, and a smoke-free annular combustor providing uniform temperatures to the turbine and using externally replaceable fuel nozzles. The turbines air-cooled airfoils allow for higher firing temperatures but keep metal temperatures lower than in first-generation engines. When it was introduced in 1969, the engines firing temperature of more than 2,000 F was the highest of any production marine turbine. In a history of the engine published in 2005 by Marine Engineers Review, authors Paul Angel, a GE marine gas turbine project and product line manager, and James Stegmaier, a retired GE engineer, said that the combination of aircooling the blades and vanes and increased stage loadings allowed an increase in the compressor ratio and the turbine temperature to achieve much lower heat rates and more output. The Admiral Callaghan, which currently is in the U.S. Maritime Administrations Ready Reserve Force, is a 24,000-ton gross weight ship powered by two LM2500 engines. It had earlier been powered by two first-generation gas

turbines. According to GE, a technical paper, General Electric Gas Turbines for Marine Propulsion Systems, estimated in 1977 that the replacement had saved approximately 100,000 barrels of fuel. Today, a great majority of the U.S. Navys surface combat ships are powered by LM2500 turbines, including the current fleet of DDG51 Arleigh Burke destroyers. The LM2500 engine was ordered as recently as last September for service in a new vessel, the F125 German naval frigate, which is in development. The LM2500 is already used in combination with diesel engines on three current classes of German frigatesthe F122 Bremen class, F123 Brandenburg class, and F124 Sachsen class. The first LM2500s went to Germany, too. After they were installed in the Admiral Callaghan, the ship set out from Bayonne, N.J., on a voyage to the German port of Bremerhaven.

A VIEW INTO NARROW PLACES A FLORIDA COMPANY IS MARKETING A PORTABLE VISUAL INSPECTION SYSTEM THAT CAN PUT A VIDEO CAMERA THROUGH 200 FEET OF PIPELINE AS NARROW AS ONE INCH.
A portable inspection system has a camera that can fit pipelines of one-inch diameter.

The company, Advanced Inspection Technologies, is offering a selfcontained one-piece system that weighs 32 pounds. The system, called PILIT (pronounced pilot), has a 60-giga-byte internal drive that can store as many as 45 hours of video images. The unit has a small, waterproof keyboard and 7-inch LCD monitor. It comes in two versions, one with a 100-foot (30-meter) cable and another with 200 feet (60 meters) of cable. It is housed in stainless steel and has two interchangeable camera heads. One is 1 inch (25 mm) in diameter. The other is 1.37 inches (34.8 mm). The system can operate on ac power, or for as long as three hours on a battery. AIT says the PILIT is designed for maintenance inspection of boiler tubes, floor drains, steam feed lines, and the like in a variety of industries, including power generation, petrochemicals, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. Advanced Inspection Technologies, which is based in Melbourne, Fla., is offering the camera system for sale or rental through its Web site, www.aitproducts.com.

CHINA TO LEAD THE SCR MARKET A new market research report is predicting that China is in the process of changing its role from an importer of NO xreduction catalyst to become the worlds top supplier. The report, NOx Control World Markets, says that China, which until recently imported all the catalyst for its power plants, has as many as eight companies gearing up to produce the material. They will eventually be able to deliver 73,000 cubic meters of selective catalytic reactor catalyst per year. The publisher of the report, the McIlvaine Co., predicts that much of the planned capacity will be in place by the end of next year and that, by 2012, China will have 38 percent of the worlds catalyst manufacturing capacity. At that time, the second-largest producer will be the United States, with 22 percent. As Chinas economic growth increases the countrys need for electricity, coal-fired plants are expected to remain

its dominant source of electric power. The Chinese government is moving rapidly to install the latest pollution controls on those plants. Next year China will retrofit plants representing 11,000 MW of nameplate capacity with selective catalytic reduction systems and will start up 30,000 MW of new coal units with SCR for an increase of 41,000 MW. This will give China more SCR capacity than exists in any country except the U.S. and Germany. According to McIlvaine Co., China represents a big market for suppliers of components such as ammonia pumps, fans needed to overcome the additional resistance of the SCR, continuous emission monitors, optimization systems, and static mixers. By 2020, China is expected to be generating more than 900,000 MW from coal-fired boilers. More than 60 percent of them will be fitted with selective catalytic reduction technology to curb unwanted emissions. This 540,000 MW of SCR compares to a worldwide total today of 300,000 MW. The McIlvaine forecast for SCR at U.S. coal plants in 2020 is 290,000 MW. Germany will have less than 20 percent as much SCR as China and no other country will have even 10 percent as much. The research company pointed out that this isnt the first time there has been a signicant shift in source of supply for SCR catalyst. Twenty years ago all the power plant catalyst production was in Europe and Japan. The McIlvaine Co. sells subscriptions to its reports, which are published online at www.mcilvainecompany.comand periodically updated. A one-year subscription to NOx Control World Markets is $3,900 for the first user and $150 for each additional user.