4.1. SR 10-06-1997 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY that have made turbochargers cheap and reliable enough for widespread use in auto- mobiles. Turbochargcrs, which squeeze more air into a car's engine to provide added kick when the driver mashes the accelerator, have strong similarities to microturbines. Capstone began life as NoMac Energy Systems, founded in 1988 by AlliedSignal alumni Jim Noe and Robin Mackay. For- merly the director of industrial market devel- opment at AlliedSignal's Garrett Corp. divi- sion, Mackay envisioned a small, high-speed turbogenerator that was uncomplicated, cheap--and not on the market anywhere. THE WINDMILL'S NARROW NICHE erating capacity are operating in the U.S., most of it in California. Several hundred thousand kilowatts of new capacity are planned in several states, but construction could be slowed down or halted by the worsening economics. People in the wind business have several ways to cope. One, says DeMeo, is to "in- ternationalize.'' In Europe and India, for example, electricity prices are similar to America's, but governments subsidize wind energy more generously. Other hopes are to serve customers in parts of the U.S. where cutthroat pricing by utilities can't reach--at off-grid sites in the middle of nowhere--or to squeeze more energy from the breezes. That's an ever- green challenge for inventors like aeronau- tical engineer Alfred Weisbrich of Eneco in West Simsbury, Connecticut. ~ Weisbrich has patented a system ~ that looks like a stack of automobile ~ wheels without tires. These toroidal shrouds, or augmenters, channel and accelerate the flow of wind into pairs of turbine generators tucked into their concave sides. Wind tun- nel tests and computer simulations conducted at Rensselaer Polytech- nic Institute in Troy, New York, and the Technical University of Graz, Austria, have shown that Weis- brich's design, called TARP (easier to say than toroidal accelerator ro- tor platform), can send wind rush- ing through the generators as much as 50% to 80% faster than in con- ventional windmills. New York State's Energy Research and De- velopment Authority has been partly funding the project. A MERE 18 MONTHS ago, wind power looked like a source of elec- tricity that could survive where sufficient breezes blow. But even efficiency gains of the past few years can't offset the combined effects of today's low fossil fuel prices, the reduction of government subsi- dies, and new competition in the power in- dustry. On the spot market, where utilities shop for cheap juice, competition has forced prices as low as 2 cents per kilowatt- hour; the most efficient wind farms operate at about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. "This restructuring has hit very quickly over the past year," says Edgar DeMeo of the util- ity-supported Electric Power Research In- stitute. "It's a tough time for anybody to be in the wind business." About 1.7 million kilowatts of wind gen- To wring more electric power from the wind, inventor Weisbrich funnels it through turbines tucked between wheellike structures. NoMac subsisted for several years on re- search contracts from such organizations as NASA, Ford Motor, and the Southwest Re- search Institute of San Antonio, until a tech- nical paper that Mackay authored caught the attention of a team of veteran researchers at Hughes Aircraft. The engineers liked the idea of developing little turbogenerators that might ultimately power low-pollution vehicles. With the back- ing of venture capitalists, they left Hughes and bought NoMac in 1993. The firm changed its name to Capstone last year, when Fletcher Challenge Ltd., a New Zealand venture capi- tal firm, signed on as a major investor. It didn't take long for CEO James Wens- iey, 61, who at Hughes had designed satellites and spacecraft that soft-landed on the moon and dived into the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, to decide that rocket science wasn't going to be enough for thc project. "We re- alized that we needed some developmental gas-turbine smarts that we just didn't have." That's when he brought in Paul Craig as en- gineering VP, who in Wensley's words "took the original concept and really made it work." Craig, 57, had been director of turbo- machinery programs at Sundstrand Corp., a maker of aircraft generators, and engineer- ing VP at AlliedSignal's Garrett automotive unit, where hc led the successful commer- cialization of car turbochargcrs. HE KNOW-HOW that has been gained in producing these tur- bochargers cheaply--they sell for around $100--may hold the key to launching microturbines into the big time. Both &vices have at their heart bladed wheels mounted on a shaft spinning blindingly fast. Says Craig, whose office trophies include some of the winning small turbines he's worked on over the years: "To be affordable, you have to keep your cyc on how turbochargers were designed for cars, with sophisticated shapes made from commodity materials using dem- onstrated manufacturing processes. That's why the project intrigued me." Part of thc trick at Capstone is to cast compressor and turbine wheels, curved blades and all, in a single piece from alumi- num and nickel-alloy steel instead of ma- chining their complex shapes. Another is de- signing the recupcrator, which increases fuel efficiency by using exhaust heat to warm in-