An overview of

Gas Turbines
A brief history about gas turbines
The first true gas turbine was designed by John Barber in 1791. His invention had most of
the elements present in the modern gas turbine. It was originally created to power a
horseless carriage.

After that there were many attempts to improve that design. Most important attempts
were of Charles Parson (1894), that patented the idea of propelling a ship with a steam
turbine (a successful attempt) and Ægidius Elling (1903), an Norwegian inventor and
researcher who was able to build a gas turbine that was able to produce more power than
needed to run it’s own components.

Until today we only see improvements on the design and the efficiency of this kind of
turbine.
Principles of operation
A gas turbine is a type of turbine that uses pressurized gas to spin it, in order
to generate electricity or to provide kinetic energy. This process is also called
Brayton Cycle.

In all modern gas turbines, the pressurized gas is created by the burning of a
fuel like natural gas, kerosene etc. The heat generated by this fuel expands
the air which flows through the turbine to supply useful energy.
 The Brayton cycle
“Open cycle” “Closed Cycle”

1 - 2 Isentropic compression (in a compressor)

2 - 3 Constant-pressure heat addition (burning)
3 - 4 Isentropic expansion (in a turbine)
4 - 1 Constant-pressure heat rejection (discharge)
Gas Turbine Design
How does it work?
They are theoretically simple design and have three main parts as seen above:

 Compressor – Takes in air from the outside of the turbine and increases the
pressure.

 Combustor – Burns the fuel and produces high pressure and high velocity gas.

 Turbine – Extracts the energy from the gas coming from the combustor.
In a little more detail…
Compressor: The air is sucked in from the left and input to the compressor
which consists of many rows of fan blades.

Combustor: The high pressure air flows into this area, which is where the fuel is
introduced. The fuel gets injected constantly into the chamber in order for the
energy through the turbine to be constant.

Turbine: The turbine is connected to the compressor blades by a shaft and they
spin separately. The compressor connects the turbine which is connected to an
output shaft and because of separate spinning, it can reach very high speeds due
to the hot gas flowing through it.
Advantages and Disadvantages
The main advantages of gas turbines are the following:
 They have great power to weight ratio compared to reciprocating engines. This ratio represents
the amount of power you get out of the engine compared to the weight of the engine itself (power
generated by the engine divided by the mass)
 Gas turbines engines are smaller than their reciprocating counterparts of the same power.

Disadvantages:
 The main disadvantage of this kind of engines are the cost, which they are more expensive than a
corresponding reciprocate engine.
 Also due to the high speed spinning and the high operating temperatures designing and
manufacturing gas turbines is a tough problem for engineers.
 Gas turbines also tend to use more fuel when they are idling, and they prefer a constant rather
than a fluctuating load.
Thank you for your attention!