Turbomachinery International: March/April 2025

Turbomachinery International’s spring edition of the year is here: March/April 2025. Maintenance and repair are always hot topics in the turbomachinery industry, and our spring issue highlights this. What’s cool is how data, smart tools, AI, and advanced technologies are impacting this field. In our cover story, Assistant Editor James Cook updates readers on how the field is evolving and improving inspections, providing more valuable data and insights, and enhancing efficiencies.

“Using AI, we’re able to gather, analyze, and act on critical inspection data much faster and at much greater volumes previously impossible,” Nicole Jenkins, Chief MRO Engineer at GE Aerospace, said. “That’s why at GE Aerospace we prioritize scrutinizing and scrubbing the data to ensure it is trusted and fully transparent.”

Along the same lines, Anthony Brough, Principal Consultant of Dora Partners & Company, and associates from Liburdi Turbine Services authored an insightful article on how leveraging visioning systems and rule-based knowledge, while not AI, provides repeatable and reliable repairs for the aerospace and industrial gas turbine industries.

According to the authors: “In a world where the availability of skilled specialists is increasingly sparse, leveraging visioning systems and rule-based knowledge to provide repeatable and reliable repairs is both possible and imperative.”

This issue also includes a short recap of POWERGEN International 2025. Full coverage and highlights are available at turbomachinerymag.com/ conference, where you can check out our video interviews, detailed session coverage, and more.

“Power generation is having its day again. After a couple of decades of flat demand, we’re seeing utilities beef up their projections in response to increased demand from data centers, onshoring from manufacturing, and increased electrification,” said Kevin Clark, Senior Content Director of Clarion Events. “There’s still a mission to decarbonize, but the wrinkle is maintaining reliability.”

What’s most exciting is our latest Turbo Tour of Texas A&M’s Turbomachinery Lab, which takes readers to College Station, Texas, to give them an inside look into the lab’s history, current research, the origin of the Turbomachinery & Pump Symposium, and exclusive interviews and insights from professors and staff.

We’ve already started rolling out our video interviews and exclusive Q&As. Dr. Adolfo Delgado, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University’s Turbomachinery Laboratory, speaks about the latest research being conducted on rotating equipment systems and components and relevant trends and changes during our video interview. Our Q&A with Dr. Eric Petersen, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Turbo Lab, discusses the facility’s latest research, trends in propulsion and combustion, and the university’s new addition: the Propulsion and Energetics Research Laboratory. Tomorrow another video interview with Greg Gammon, Director of Global and Corporate Partnerships, goes live!

Also in this issue, the Myth Busters debunk the myth that torsional vibrations are “no problem”—although torsional vibrations in turbomachinery trains are usually well-controlled, Klaus Brun and Rainer Kurz urge readers to address issues proactively during the design process to avoid significant damage.

“One of the challenges with torsional vibrations is that they are often difficult to detect,” Brun and Kurz said. “Most turbomachinery trains are not instrumented to monitor torsional vibrations, and typical torque meters used for power measurements cannot resolve them. As a result, torsional issues may remain unnoticed until a shaft or coupling fails, often causing significant damage and disruption.”

Amin Almasi’s Turbo Tips column explains how renovating modern dry gas seals and their systems increases reliability.

Click here to view March/April 2025.