Most combustion turbine owners and operators hope that replacement parts will simply duplicate the performance and reliability of the original. That's not good enough for Eastern Technical Services (
www.etspower.com), which combines new technology with industry experience in its efforts to provide better and cheaper alternatives.
ETS was founded in Stuart, Fla., in 2000 by former engineers and executives of the gas turbine original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Pratt & Whitney. The company's biggest customers are turbine users who rely on ETS for manufactured parts, custom design and inspection services, and product life-cycle management.
A key advantage of buying aftermarket parts is knowing that they incorporate the latest in advanced materials and protective coatings and were designed using precision, state-of-the-art methods. By contrast, an OEM part may not have been upgraded in a decade and has probably been sitting in a warehouse somewhere for just as long.
Do you operate one or more gas turbines that might benefit from a fresh set of buckets or nozzles, upgraded combustion liners and transition pieces, or new fuel nozzles? A few phone calls to the OEM about replacement parts may have given you sticker shock and convinced you that your budget can't cover them. At this point, aftermarket parts may look pretty good. But they'll look even better when you realize how precisely turbine blades are recreated, making them distinct improvements over the originals.
Turbocharged tool
Over the past few years, ETS has leveraged its engineering expertise with digital shape sampling and processing (DSSP) technologies to fuel major leaps in design productivity.
DSSP is a category of tools that encompasses multiple technologies. It enables engineers to use scanning hardware and geometry processing software to represent physical objects in digital form. By crunching data in the digital domain, DSSP can automatically create accurate 3D models of real-world structures to facilitate their design, engineering, inspection, testing, and manufacturing. What digital signal processing is to audio, DSSP is to 3D geometry.
DSSP requires two essential components: an optical scanner to capture point data and software to convert the data to binary form. The advances in scanner technology made over the past decade made DSSP possible. Previously, engineers were limited to manually capturing one point at a time. Modern optical scanners can collect millions of points in the time it used to take to record a few points. With DSSP, it is possible to capture the entire bounding surface geometry of a physical object, including its features, colors, and even textures.
Gathering millions of points of data would have little or no value, of course, unless the data could be assembled into models precise enough for design, analysis, prototyping, or manufacturing work. That's where software plays a critical role.
Ever-more-affordable desktop processing power and the advent of innovative geometric processing algorithms have made DSSP a mainstream application. Point-cloud data that would have choked a high-end computing system five years ago now can be easily digested by a modern PC. Gaps and noise in scanning data that used to take days to resolve are now corrected automatically. Conversion to polygons and non-uniform rational b-spline (NURBS) surfaces, which once required days of tedious work, now can be handled in minutes using a natural, intuitive workflow.
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