Russia’s Power Machines takes another step toward domestic gas turbine

Russia’s Power Machines said it has started the tooling necessary for the production of the inner casing of the GTE-170 gas turbine, a key step in the process to create completely domestic gas turbines of large and medium power.

The inner casing of a gas turbine is a technically complex structure made of nickel alloy, a prototype of which, within the framework of R&D, will be manufactured by specialists of the Leningrad Metal Plant, where the production of Russian gas turbines of medium and large capacity is currently underway.

Russia’s Power Machines said it has started the tooling necessary for the production of the inner casing of the GTE-170 gas turbine, a key step in the process to create completely domestic gas turbines of large and medium power.

At the moment, equipment for bending parts of the inner body has been manufactured and tested on steel samples. In the first quarter of 2021, work will be completed on testing equipment for bending on nickel alloy parts, the company said.

Power Machines started developing a domestic line of power gas turbines of two standard sizes - GTE-65 and GTE-170 - in 2018. Since then, a design bureau has been created, design documentation has been developed, design work is underway.

The first turbine GTE-170 was put into production, the revision of GTE-65 was completed, which was previously manufactured, but its tests were not completed. The production of gas turbines GTE-65 and GTE-170 is deployed at LMZ. This is complementary to the manufacturing operations that the plant has historically done. The production is being retrofitted with equipment for opening up bottlenecks. The plant has its own experimental and research base for testing full-size units of combustion chambers of power gas turbine plants on full-scale parameters.

Power Machines said the R&D plan is being implemented with the participation of the country’s leading research enterprises. Re-equipment of production is being carried out, work with suppliers is being actively carried out. In 2019, Power Machines won the competition of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia for subsidizing R&D for this project.