Turbine blades, an innovative product
10 June 2019
Umnoe Proizvodstvo magazine, June 2019
Pumori-Energy, a Pumori Corporation company, was established in 2001. This August the company was 18 years old, and a high-tech producer with a solid reputation of a reliable supplier. Its core business is manufacture and sale of blades and vanes for both production of steam and gas turbines and compressors, and for their repair and retrofit in field. Pumori Energy Director Iurii Iamploskii relates:
“It is well known that blades are a critical element of a turbine, determining its reliability; we could say they are one of its paramount parts. Turbine blades are subjected to high temperatures, corrosion, erosion, and dynamic and temperature stresses. Therefore, the reliability of blades is subjected to exceptionally stringent requirements.
Pumori-Energy constantly runs in new types of products, including blading for foreign-made turbines. During the 18 years, we launched the production of blades for steam turbines of 6 to 1000 MW and gas turbines of 3 to 25 MW. Besides, the company manufactures blades and vanes for compressors of gas turbines GTN 6, GTK 10 4, GTN 25, and turbines operating at chemical and metallurgical works, e. g. GTT 3M, GTT 12, GUBT 25, GTU 8. Pumori-Energy produces blades and vanes for turbocompressors of Japanese and Czech manufacture, and working blades for MAN gas turbines used in compressor stations of gas pipelines.
At present, the company manufactures blades and vanes for steam and gas turbines up to 700 mm high and up to 6.0 kg in weight; the minimum height of the blades/vanes is 20 mm, and the mass, 0.015 kg. In March of this year, Bureau Veritas Certification Rus recertified the Quality Management System of Pumori-Energy for compliance with the requirements of the industry-specific International Standard ISO 9001:2015.
One of our substantial achievements, as we think, is that we recently began to produce gas turbine blades of alloys with 65–77% of nickel, of the VT 8 titanium, and of duralumin.
In 2019, Pumori-Energy manufactured the first set of assemblies of working blades of the control stage of the PT 135 130 turbine. They were made of rolled stock without the traditional process of making assemblies by welding two blades together.
The company implements a lot of innovations, the production using modern machining centres and measuring equipment. Blades and vanes are fabricated with carbide tools made by the world’s leading manufacturers. The machining takes place in 4 and 5 axis machining centres of Okuma (Japan) and C. B. Ferrari (Italy). At present, we are using 14 machining centres. Other equipment includes a German spectrometer, a Japanese marking machine a. o. Manufacturing quality is checked with two DEA high-precision coordinate measuring machines. We also use licenced automated programming systems for turbine blade/vane milling, the core of which is software from AutoDesk and Siemens PLM Software.
Our specialists compile state-of-the-art CNC programs and machining processes, which bring up high productivity. The equipment and the CNC programs made by the specialists make it possible to quickly manufacture pilot or new types of blades and vanes of high quality. We can also re-engineer a blade/vane by constructing a 3D model according to a specimen provided by the customer, etc.
Success in our high-tech segment is only possible with process innovation. In 2018, we started commercial operation of the Dispatcher shopfloor data collection system, which provides current data on the usage intensity of the machining centres and on the time required to produce each nomenclature unit. Purposeful work at improvement of production efficiency in 2019 made it possible to significantly increase the load factor of machining centres, raise labor productivity by 10%, and reduce production downtime by 25% year on year.
Furthermore, the company introduced use of the Matrix toolbox, an automated storage and retrieval system for cutting tools, enabling machining centre operators themselves (without a toolkeeper) obtain the necessary cutting tools according to the machining process 24 hours a day. The information coming from the Matrix software makes it possible to control of tool issue per unit of product, start rationing tool usage, and schedule measures to increase the efficiency of its use.
Nowadays, Pumori-Energy manufactures blades and vanes for Russian turbine works, servicing companies and power stations from various regions of Russia, and also exports its products to Italy, Greece, China and other countries, including the CIS: Kazakhstan, Belarus. In 2018, the company manufactured about 55 000 blades and vanes for steam and gas turbines and compressors. The company development strategy for the next five years calls for further stepping-up of the blading production.
Another goal for the mid-term horizon is expansion in foreign markets. This calls for active marketing. The company is a constant participant in major international power-industry exhibitions. We were in the international exhibitions in Cologne in 2017, and in Vienna in 2018, and we are planning to take part in the industry fair in Paris in 2019.”