抄録
Steam turbine generation has been around for a century now. Beside ongoing investigations aimed at improving economy in operation, the changed political scene as well as globalisation can be considered as prime movers associated with the development of modern power plant facilities. Based on a greater understanding of metallurgy and modern software solutions inner efficiencies above 96% and steam parameters of 620℃ underline the up-to-date STPP turbine technology ensuring net efficiency levels up to 47%. The power generation industry has mastered all these challenges in the past finally ensuring a head start to meet all future market demands and environmental pressures necessitating further steps for highly-efficient and reliable generating technologies. Further investigations on high temperature applications such as the European initiative E_<max> aiming for steam parameters up to 700℃ and net efficiency levels of above 50% have been initiated and are still under way. Besides presenting market developments and environmental requirements, state-of-the-art steam turbine technology as well as a future outlook for present R&D programs and design principles are key issues in the following paper. Focusing on the progress in material development, steam turbine blading technology as well as component design features are described in detail.
