A Partial History of Water-Cooled Gas Turbines

This article focuses on the work done at GE from 1960s to the early 1980s. GE funded the project of developing a full pressure/full temperature model of the same size. Test facilities were also built and run to gather data on potential problems such as: long term effects of partial channel water cooling on erosion, corrosion, and deposition; water supply, distribution and collection in the outer casing; materials testing with contaminated fuels. The results of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) program were sufficiently encouraging that GE and EPRI decided to advocate a bigger project to the US Department of Energy to demonstrate the concept in utility size components. GE dropped work on water cooling in the early 1980s. Part of the reason was concern of instabilities in the boiling water.