Turbine Failures

Turbine failures in Power Station's are extremely rare, but if they happen they can be catastrophic and very expensive. Martin Beottcher gave a presentation on the occurrences of steam turbine failures in power stations, showing some examples from around the world and how they occurred.

Steam turbines are very large machines that covert steam into kinetic energy, in turn driving a generator to output electricity. Problems can occur if the coolant, hydrogen is contaminated with oxygen, creating an explosive atmosphere. Or a turbine is run without load and overheating the blades, or many other fault conditions.

Fortunately these are very rare occurrences, but where these have occurred the damage can be severe and result in very costly repairs, not least the loss of electricity supply to communities for considerable lengths of time.

One of the main issues with turbine failures is sourcing replacement components, taking months, if not years to have components manufactured.  Australia has many different models of steam turbines and this means very little standardisation. So when a machine fails parts may be hard to source. Keeping spare parts is not usually needed and would be very expensive. Preventative maintenance, monitoring and servicing prevents turbine failures. (Ed. And that's why engineers get paid the big dollars!)  

Peter Ruben gave a vote of thanks to Martin on an interesting presentation and an aspect of power generation few of us would be aware.