Session: 21-06 Design Methods

Submission Number: 177734

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA): Baker Hughes (BH) Approach to Steam Turbine Product 

LCA analysis is gaining increasing visibility in industrial environment; for this reason, companies are required to develop/adopt robust and reliable tools to manage such analyses.

The case study included in the proposed article describes Baker Hughes' approach to the LCA of the steam turbines that are designed, developed, built and tested in its Italian plants. Industrial steam turbines are not repetitive products; in fact, they are optimized job by job depending on the different steam conditions and cycle configurations of the specific plant where they will be installed. For this reason, given the huge machine configurations variability, the life cycle assessment must reflect the design philosophy. To ensure design timelines consistent with market demands and provide a robust and referenced solution, steam turbine design is based on a modularity concept, whereby it is not the machine itself that is standardized, but rather its subcomponents along with the rules that define how they can be assembled. In addition, the subcomponents are geometrically scaled to adapt to the required volumetric flow rates required for the specific job.

Starting from this assumption, the first step of the activity has been the definition of turbine sub-components LCA models. Such models are parametric to adapt to the scalability of the components. During this phase, production processes that were not present in the reference databases (ECOINVENT) or were not applicable to the peculiarity of the component production process have been modeled leveraging supplier knowledge.

The next step requires the definition of an IT environment able to interact with the company databases to extract the parameters required for the LCA models, select the models applicable to the specific turbine from the subcomponent model library, execute the analysis, and prepare the LCA report. In this phase, it will be crucial to identify and associate the version of the ECOINVENT database used for the analysis and to identify the sub-components model version to guarantee analysis robustness and quality.

Final scope of the activity is a tailored, robust and reliable tool for entire steam turbines (flange to flange) or sub-components LCA that can be used starting from the commercial phase up to the detailed design phase.

Keywords: steam turbines, LCA, modular approach.

Presenting Author: Luca Giacomelli BAKER HUGHES

Presenting Author Biography: Luca graduated in Aeronautical Engineering in 1997 at "Università degli studi di Pisa".
Joined Nuovo Pignone in 1998 and within the company he has cumulated more than 25 years of experience on Industrial Steam Turbines.

Authors:

Luca Giacomelli BAKER HUGHES
Sara Gaggioli BAKER HUGHES
Elvira Macrellino BAKER HUGHES
Michele Germani Università Politecnica delle Marche
Luca Manuguerra Università Politecnica delle Marche
Miriana Mundo Università Politecnica delle Marche