Turbomachinery Controls go High Tech

Remote Monitoring, Digitization, Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, Hydrogen Blending, Auto-Tuning, Big Data, and Digital Twins.

Let’s begin with a home-appliance analogy. Modern refrigerators come with a long list of features including sophisticated temperature settings, voice control, alerts when certain supplies are low or the milk goes bad, and more. On the downside, their motherboards sometimes struggle to cope with cold temperature. Hence, you sometimes hear people longing for the old days when an old-school freezer could last for decades. However, those old freezers were also energy hogs and would be unlikely to receive an acceptable Energy Star rating. In any case, their manufacturing costs would probably be difficult to justify today.

Similarly, I’ve been to trade shows and heard veterans lament the demise of old turbomachinery control systems. They complain that the new versions come with all kinds of digital bells and whistles, yet they sometimes lack reliability and can be difficult (or expensive) to fix. There can be some truth to their assertions. Yet, modern controls can do so much more than legacy systems.