Gas Turbine Handbook : Principles and Practices

Evolution of the Gas Turbine 7
Some six years behind Whittle, Germany’s Hans Pabst von Ohain
put forth his ideas for a turbojet engine in 1935. It consisted of a compound
axial-centrifugal compressor similar to Whittle’s patent design
and a radial turbine. H.P. von Ohain’s designs were built by aircraft
manufacturer Ernst Heinkel. August 24, 1939 marked the first flight
of a turbojet aircraft, the He 178, powered by the HeS 3B engine.
Throughout the war years various changes were made in the
design of these engines: radial and axial turbines, straight through
and reverse flow combustion chambers, and most notably the axial
compressor. The compressor pressure ratio, which started at 2.5:1 in
1900, went to 5:1 in 1940, 15:1 in 1960, and is currently approaching
40:1. Since the Second World War, improvements made in the aero
gas turbine-jet engine industry have been transferred to the stationary
gas turbine. Following the Korean War, the Pratt & Whitney
Aircraft designed JT3 (the military designation was the J57) provided
the cross-over from the aero gas turbine to the stationary gas turbine.
The JT3 became the FT3 aeroderivative. In 1959, Cooper Bessemer
installed the world’s first base-load aeroderivative industrial gas
turbine, the FT3, in a compressor drive application for Columbia
Gulf Transmission Co. at their Clementsville, Ky., mainline compressor
station (Figure 1-3). The unit, designated the RT-246, generated
10,500 brake horsepower (BHP) driving a Cooper-Bessemer RF2B-
30 pipeline compressor. 9 In 1981, that unit had accumulated over
100,000 operating hours and is still active.
Table 1-1 is a chronology of key events in the development of
the gas turbine as it evolved in conjunction with the steam turbine.
Absent from this list are an unknown number of inventors such as
John Dumball. Their contribution was not in demonstrating to the
engineering community what worked, but what did not work.
TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS
The growth of the gas turbine in recent years has been brought
about most significantly by three factors:
• metallurgical advances that have made possible the employment
of high temperatures in the combustor and turbine components,