Turbomachinery, Decarbonization Trends from TPS Chairman

Turbomachinery International spoke with Dag Calafell, Advisory Committee Chair of Turbomachinery & Pump Symposia (TPS) and Asia TPS, about the latest trends in turbomachinery and efforts that he sees across the industry to decarbonize.

TURBO: What trends you’re seeing in turbomachinery?

CALAFELL: What we're seeing now is that the traditional turbomachinery topics are still important, but we're looking more at how to integrate the turbomachinery optimization/reliability topics using AI, using machine learning, and how can we be part of a larger system where we're optimizing revenues, profitability, and supply chain logistics.

TURBO: What efforts are you seeing for decarbonization?

CALAFELL: A couple of presentations earlier today addressed decarbonization. One was on integrating gas turbines into bottoming cycles, and another one was a tutorial on using all the various technologies for carbon capture. It talked about how today we're using amines but what are we going to be doing in the future, such as exhaust gas recirculation? So, a lot of our program is indeed how do we minimize our emissions. One of our end users is working on using AI and machine learning algorithms to optimize their turbomachinery trains to run them at peak efficiency and therefore reduce emissions across the entire company.