Texas A&M’s Turbo Lab: Student-First Research with Industry-Wide Goals

Around 1971, at the urging of Charlie Jackson, a notable oil and gas engineer in Houston, Prof. Meherwan Boyce of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M established the Gas Turbine Laboratories, now known as the Turbomachinery Lab.

Around the same time, a group of Texas A&M (TAMU) engineering graduates organized the first Turbomachinery Symposium as a concerted effort to assist Gulf Coast downstream operators with equipment challenges.

Today, the Turbo Lab is a 37,000-square-foot facility equipped with 12 vibration-damped test cells and numerous air compressors to drive test rigs. Despite the lab’s leading sophistication, the experienced faculty largely place operations in the hands of the future: TAMU students.

Turbomachinery International toured the Turbo Lab in February with Greg Gammon, Director of Global and Corporate Partnerships, and Dr. Adolfo Delgado, Associate Professor, leading the charge. The duo offered an in-depth history of TAMU itself, the Turbomachinery & Pump Symposium (TPS), and the Turbo Lab’s efforts to advance research for rotating machinery

Main high-bay testing facility.

THE TOUR

Despite the Turbo Lab’s sprawling nature, some of it was inaccessible due to construction for an upcoming facility: the Propulsion Energetics Research Laboratory (PERL), designed with open and closed configurations for propulsion and gas turbine applications, as well as dynamic events such as detonations and explosions. Still, Dr. Delgado guided the tour through the main high-bay location and offered insight on its layout, purpose, and how it’s used in the modern day.

“When this building was designed, they created this space with the idea that equipment would be brought in via 18-wheeler, you lay it next to a test cell and work on it, and then roll it in for testing,” Delgado said. “We have 12 test cells, and each has two rooms. One is a control room with equipment for data acquisition and equipment control, while the other is an isolated test area. The test cell is separated by a wall that’s fire-, shock-, and sound-proof.”

Each test area contains a six-foot-deep concrete slab that’s isolated from the building’s foundation, preventing the transfer of test-induced vibration to its critical infrastructure. The facility’s top level is mainly comprised of additional offices, which, according to Delgado, host computational work, materials testing equipment, an additive manufacturing facility, and a library.

Within many of these cells, TAMU students are currently conducting rotordynamics testing. “One of the common themes at the Turbo Lab, specifically for rotordynamics, is component-level testing,” Delgado said. “This example is a tilting pad bearing controlled-motion test rig, in which we isolate the bearing and characterize its dynamic forced performance. We test a bearing at rotor surface speeds comparable to or the same as ones you would see on a high-speed compressor, for example. This is an element from a compressor OEM that we’ve been testing.”

He emphasized that, after adequate laboratory certification, students operate all test cells, as the Turbo Lab prides itself on “training professionals.” The test rig vibrates the floating bearing with an electrohydraulic shaker capable of transferring dynamic loads while the static loader simulates the machine’s weight under a real-life operating scenario. Delgado said that most testing, which is sponsored by industry participants, aims to validate models or new concepts for OEMs and end users. In terms of component-level testing, the Lab also evaluates annular clearance seals performance.

Fluid-film bearing test rig.

“In this cell, we test high-pressure oil and gas seals,” Delgado said. “We’re currently testing labyrinth or textured seals designed to stabilize machines like high-speed compressors. We’ve also been working with 3D-printed seals for prototyping and testing different surface texture concepts. Isolating component performance is a necessary part of component-level testing, as it would be more difficult to assess performance within the full-scale machine itself.”

Given that students are testing machinery and components under real-world conditions, safety is a top priority among faculty. A safety officer enforces a strict protocol, which includes safety training at the university, lab, and test-cell levels. The training is comprised of online and in-person aspects, the latter of which includes education on energy sources and how to manage emergencies, such as oil spills.

The Lab also contains a full-scale machine shop for manufacturing smaller components or modifying existing components. A facility manager leads the shop, but students may use the tools if they’ve received proper training.

The last test cell was conducting combustion-related research with shock tubes, and Dr. Delgado handed off the tour to Dr. Claire Grégoire, a post-doctoral researcher at TAMU. “It’s a long piece of tubing split into two sections separated by a diaphragm,” Grégoire said. “We study the gas phase of a mixture that can be fuel-air or electrolytes in a lithium-ion battery. We fill one side with pressure so the diaphragm breaks and sends a shockwave, igniting the mixture on the other side. Optical or laser elements monitor the combustion properties.”

Shock-tube combustion testing.

Two other students were assessing oil combustion properties with the same shock-tube technology, deploying the aforementioned laser absorption spectroscopy to measure the concentration of specific chemical species precisely. This allows researchers to study combustion kinetics at high temperatures and pressures by tracking the formation and decay of key reactions.

ABOUT THE TURBO LAB & TPS

The Turbo Lab is part of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) and focuses on three key areas: research, education, and workforce development. The main facility is located in College Station, Texas, and primarily studies rotordynamics and mechanical systems, thermal fluids and combustion, and computational modeling and design.

Dr. Eric Petersen, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of Texas A&M’s Turbo Lab, said new research covers power generation gas turbines, rocket propulsion systems, explosion and detonation safety limits, aviation jet propulsion, and hypersonic propulsion systems. “In recent years, we have also been developing methods for studying coke formation and possible ignition in lubrication oils when exposed to elevated temperatures.”

Gammon stressed that the Turbo Lab’s role and history are interlinked with the TPS conference: “The symposia did not originate from Texas A&M. Instead, it originated from an industry that was looking to solve problems. In the late 1960s and early 70s, a group of machinery engineers in the Gulf Coast region faced massive machinery failures in ethylene plants, primarily due to the uptick in plastic demand. These engineers came together, and, luckily, some were Texas A&M graduates.”

Gammon said that both TPS and Asia TPS are the Turbo Lab’s biggest assets, with industry-leading individuals and companies volunteering for a spot on the advisory committee. Speaking on his own role, Gammon put it simply: facilitating knowledge transfer.

“We have very smart people in many different places,” Gammon said. “We have smart people doing research at the laboratory, including students and professors; we have smart people on our advisory committees; and we have smart people teaching short courses outside of TPS and presenting at the symposia. Everything I do facilitates that.”

Perhaps the biggest upcoming development for the Turbo Lab is the Industry Certification Program that will help educate rotating equipment engineers across a variety of industries, such as oil and gas, petroleum, power production, and additional industrial applications. Being certified under this program will demonstrate a practical knowledge base to employers in the field, potentially bridging the skill/experience gap brought on by the exodus of older professionals and the influx of younger, inexperienced engineers.

By combining face-to-face courses, rigorous testing, and continued education to maintain competency, engineers can be certified by top subject matter experts in numerous fields, including but not limited to:

• Mechanical seals
• Rotordynamics
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Gas turbines
• Steam turbines
• Compressors
• Pumps
• Bearings

“Major companies can use these certifications to judge placement,” Gammon said. “It also helps standardize development and competence, like API develops a standard of education for rotating equipment engineers. This program is designed for working engineers, not field technicians. The curriculum will be developed by industry instructors and includes testing, which we don't do in any of our current courses.”

STUDENTS FIRST

The Turbo Lab maintains its student-first focus throughout all the research operations, educational initiatives, and industry-oriented conferences. “Students are our primary product and everything that we do,” Gammon said. “Even in the symposia, we bring our students. We are educating at the lab, and we want to engage them with continuous education programs.”

Dr. Delgado said, quoting the late professor and Turbo Lab director, Dr. Dara Childs, they are in the business of training professionals, “everything else is secondary to that, including the research that we do. That’s reflected in the lab, as everything you see is done by students since we don’t rely on technicians.”

Although the Turbo Lab has been conducting world-class research on rotating machinery for decades, it does not lose sight of its educational roots, allowing students to obtain hands-on knowledge before entering the workforce. With the knowledge gap growing between older or retiring professionals and newer engineers, Texas A&M’s Turbo Lab ensures that the new generation will be equipped to handle the current and future energy challenges and opportunities.

Check out our video and written interviews with Dr. Adolfo Delgado, Greg Gammon, and Dr. Eric Petersen.