SpinOffs

Super critical carbon dioxide power (sCO₂) cycles are attracting a lot of interest these days all over the world. Many initiatives using various levels of private and public funding are in progress in several countries right now. Preliminary testing on small scale units have shown that such systems are technically viable. The next round of larger scale testing under way now will determine if the concepts are financially viable as well.

Turbomachinery is used in a very wide variety of industries and applications.   While applications like aerospace ‘jet engines’ or powerplant steam turbines are the applications that come to mind for a lot of people, turbomachinery is integrated with or buried in a huge range of other equipment, and often transparent to the user.   I give a talk to local middle school sciences classes on what turbomachinery is, and give a quiz at the end of the talk where I ask them to list every piece of turbomachinery in their home. The students have surprised me with their understanding and reasoning ability, and I now have a list of 20 to 30 examples of turbomachinery running in their homes.