Turbine engines serve as the primary and/or auxiliary power source for numerous NASA, DoD, and commercial enterprises. It is a desired cost-driven goal that gas turbine engines have a long lifecycle, with ability to refurbish deteriorated hardware for additional service life without replacement. While some engines have approached this goal, others have fallen significantly short. For example, time between overhauls (TBO) for 501K-34 gas turbine engine has been falling significantly short (<10,000 h) of the 25,000 h goal primarily because of hot corrosion damage noted on high pressure turbine hardware. Operational changes and future needs will require increased turbine operating temperatures and change the associated operating environment to one where Type I and Type II hot corrosion and oxidation will be prevalent in newly anticipated operational profiles.
The market consist of all potential energy consumers, the need for next generation high temperature corrosion resistant materials is critical to improving generation efficiencies and reducing production costs. However, it is believe that once optimized this process could improve energy efficiency up to 20% in steam turbine plants alone. This would be accomplished by reducing the amount of waste heat discharged from steam power systems, which is estimated at 280,000 MW. That energy is enough to provide up to 20% of the U.S. electricity needs while slashing natural resource consumption, GHG, and saving $70-150B per year on energy costs.
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