SwRI

San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) said on Aug. 12 it will get $3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and another $760,658 from an assortment of industry giants to design a large-scale flameless pressurized oxy-fuel combustion pilot plant.  The announcement is a major boost for the promising, but yet unproven technology, that […]

First ground has been broken on a 10-MW pilot of a novel supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) technology, a $119 million project that will refine the sCO2 power cycle and demonstrate component performance and scalability.  Construction of the Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) pilot plant at the 15-acre facility at Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI’s) San Antonio, […]

Engineers test autonomous UAS to fly inside damaged nuclear power station SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is developing unmanned aerial system (UAS) technology to fly into the containment vessels of the damaged units at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station and assess conditions. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Incorporated (TEPCO […]

Supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) cycles—which are inching closer to commercial applications for waste heat recovery, concentrating solar power, nuclear, and fossil energy—offer higher thermal efficiencies and power density than conventional steam Rankine and Air Brayton cycles in use today for power generation. But to realize these potentially game-changing cycles, common challenges associated with turbomachinery must […]

Three projects to advance turbine systems for gas-fired power plants SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is a member of three teams awarded funding by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory to develop technologies to advance the state-of-the-art in power generation. The three projects total about $18.2 million in DOE and private […]