Case Study: Alstom achieves faster, more efficient steam turbine start-ups with Dassault Systèmes' Abaqus FEA

Alstom Power utilizes Abaqus FEA to improve steam turbine efficiency

Alstom, a leading steam-turbine manufacturer, faced the challenge of enabling much faster turbine start-ups and more flexible operation without exceeding thermal and mechanical stress limits. To model transient thermo-mechanical behavior and optimize start-up procedures, Alstom used Abaqus FEA from Dassault Systemes to move beyond simplified earlier methods and better predict creep, fatigue and deformation during rapid ramps.

Using Dassault Systemes’ Abaqus, Alstom automated an optimization loop that links Abaqus to its in-house thermodynamic code via Python and a feedback control algorithm to adjust mass flow and thermal boundary conditions each time-step. The solution delivered faster, more accurate start-up parameters (validated against previous methods), led to a rotor-groove design change, reduced the typical optimization effort from about 10 man-days to 5, and ran the automated 60-minute start-up optimization in roughly 16 minutes on a standard engineering PC.

Alstom

Andreas Ehrsam

Project Manager