An aerial view of
Alstom’s Birr, Switzerland, facility, including
the company’s Test
Power Plant.
Ten Years of
Intensive Testing
Alstom’s Birr Test Power Plant ensures that the customer benefits
The Test Power Plant of Alstom in Birr close to Alstom Power headquarters in
Baden, Switzerland, is better know as the “test center,” however, the official name
seems to be more appropriate to a site where electric power is produced and sold to
the local grid and not just dissipated into load banks or a water brake.
Ten years ago Alstom invested over 100 million Swiss Francs to set up this facility that has changed the way of developing and implementing gas turbines.
The need that pushed the company to set up this plant was to understand and solve
the problems encountered in the first machines of the GT24/GT26 gas turbine fleet.
To get fuel gas to feed a 300 MW class machine Alstom had to build a 7 km long
high-pressure natural gas pipeline to connect to the Swiss gas distribution network,
in turn linked to the main European pipeline system. The power produced is sold
to the local electric power utility. The income from electricity sales only contributes
to a fraction of the operating costs of the power plant. The rest is covered by the
R&D of Alstom, which is investing over 10 million Swiss Francs each year in this
type of research activity.
Being connected to the grid allows testing to be done under real grid conditions
and at unrestricted levels of output or testing durations. The Birr GT26 gas turbine
is operated less than 500 hours per year and is opened once a year, on average, for
change of components under test and installation of special test devices.
As well as validating the components, validating the calculation tools and
methods used for improvement of the gas turbines is of paramount importance,
which then allows the transfer of this experience to the engineering process and
to other machines.
Alstom has been the first company to use thermal paint tests in heavy-duty gas tur-
bine development. All the hot gas path
components of the GT26 were painted.
This method allows the measurement
of surface temperatures in the gas path
after just a few minutes of operation,
thus allowing calibration of the thermal
calculations for the lifetime calculations.
This obviates the need to accumulate
hours in order to detect component
deterioration induced by thermal stress-es, as was once the practice.
Upgrades introduced into the fleet
have been first validated on the machine of the Test Power Plant. The first
GT24/GT26 compressor upgrade validation campaign was done in 2002.
The second upgrade, unveiled at the
Power-Gen Europe meeting in 2006,
was previously validated in the test
program carried out in 2005. The
upgrading program currently on test in
Birr will be transferred to production
machines after validation on the test
machine is complete.
This is the policy Alstom has implemented and the results have been
detectable.
The Gas Natural Cartagena plant in
Spain features three GT26s in a single
shaft combined-cycle configuration.
These were the first machines delivered
after the implementation of the new
