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Southwest Research Institute engineers are developing a cooled, radial gas turbine for a small generator that provides thousands of hours of electricity to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a significant improvement to current UAV turbines that only operate a few hundred hours before wearing out.
Turbines are rotary mechanical devices that, when combined with a generator, produce electrical power.
"This turbine is part of a generator that's similar to what the average person might use to generate electricity in their home when the power goes out," said David Ransom of SwRI's Mechanical Engineering Division. "The version we're creating is more compact and efficient, tailored to the needs of a small, unmanned aircraft."
The problem with current small turbine models is that during the generator's combustion process, the turbine is constantly bathed in high temperature gas that ultimately damages or destroys it.
"The hotter the turbine gets, the better its performance," Ransom said. "But these smaller turbines can't survive the temperature, so we've designed one that has tiny airflow passages that cool the turbine without sacrificing the power of its performance. Normally with small turbines you have to make a choice between performance or reliability, but we're making it possible to have both."
SwRI has worked with internal passages of high temperature turbines on large version used in power plants and passenger airplanes. To create the small, intricate design with internal air passages, engineers are using a new selective laser melting (SLM) machine, which builds metal parts layer by layer. The new SLM machine, which arrived at SwRI in December 2017, sets itself apart from other 3D printers in that it's built to craft layered and highly detailed metal parts rather than plastic ones.
[...] "Generators that provide power to us and to big aircraft already have cooled turbines, whereas a generator of this size for a small craft does not," Ransom said. "It's an exciting engineering challenge, and having the ability to print parts with the SLM machine is a real advantage."
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday September 10 2018, @10:14PM (1 child)
I suppose that means it's time to hash out the semantic subtext of this discussion. It's almost as if we are pretending that the word 'generator' has only one precise meaning and that the other guy must be confused about something else, based on how he used that word. That meaning is, of course, a component that turns rotary motion into electrical current. Those of us wise in the ways of technology realize, as well, that a generator needs a prime mover, such as (in this case) a piston engine or a turbine engine, without which it will not function. To speak of a turbine as a part of a generator is ridiculous, and indicates a gross misunderstanding of how things work.
However, there is an equally acceptable meaning for 'generator' that has been in use for decades, and that meaning refers to the entire assembly whose function is to output electrical power. These may be more precisely referred to as motor-generators, or turbo-generators, but the lack of precision doesn't negate the overall meaning. For these items, the prime mover is a component of the whole. This is the meaning used in the article's quoted summary.
I realize that being pedantic can be fun, and I had fun with my earlier comment that intentionally misunderstood the prior comments, but now I find myself wondering if the discussion of the improved thermodynamics would have been further along had we all just skipped it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday September 10 2018, @10:39PM
The mechanical engineer in question in explaining the relevance of his work by basically saying that "this thingy can be connected to a generator which is like a generator" in broad terms (redundant nonsense) and "this device attaches to a generator, and that generator is itself like a generator very, very specific but completely unrelated in kind, size, design, and application" in a more specific sense (just nonsense).
Either way it's sleight-of-mouth that pulls any discussion away from the device or its relevance, and explains it in terms that are less useful than even "Libraries of Congress" or "school buses" or "elephants" or "typed double-spaced sheets of (letter/A4) paper" which at least are units of measure, to a degree.
And I agree, it's hard to say whether just letting nonsense flow right by vs. saying "hey, that's nonsense" improves a given discussion. I think the edge often goes to having the ancillary discussion about whether the nonsense itself furthers the original discussion. My position is no (I think it distracts and distorts), others have responsible opposing views.