Posts Tagged ‘ energy tooling ’

One midwest University near the Michigan-Ohio border is set to help discover the most efficient green energy manufacturing methods, hopefully stamping, with new funds from the U.S. Department of Energy.
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Tooling companies slowed by shifts in automotive production could hopefully turn excess capacity into opportunities for alternative energy OEMs looking for capable manufacturing partners. One such industry is the hydropower, or hydroelectric field. Here is a diagram of a hydro system (courtesty of Meriam-Webster)

What is Hydropower? In the simplest of terms it’s the utilization of water to create electricity or movement of machines. Since the process or cycle of water evaporates, accumulates, precipates, and flows back into the main water sources it’s renewable.

Although, most of the structures or components of a hydroelectric system require fabrication or tooling, most aspirations of work in alternative energy industries focuses on turbines.

These systems mostly use two different types of turbines, Reaction & Impulse:

Reaction Turbines:

Generates power from combination of moving water & pressure. Used in conditions where the amount of standing water (“Head”) is lower and volume, or flow of water is higher.

Primary types include: Propellor, Francis (uses “runner” & vanes), & Kinetic. (below is image of “Kaplan-style” propellor turbine.

Described by the U.S. Department of Energy as, “A propeller turbine generally has a runner with three to six blades in which the water contacts all of the blades constantly. Picture a boat propeller running in a pipe. Through the pipe, the pressure is constant; if it isn’t, the runner would be out of balance.”

As you can see, the demand for precision machining and tooling will likely be in demand as demonstrated in the close-up shot of the Kaplan propellor turbine above.. Perhaps our government realizes the travesty they committed as they allowed their automotive manufacturing–tooling–base to be ravaged by unimaginably skewed global playing fields.

Tomorrow I’ll briefly cover the other type of turbine often used, Impulse Turbines.

~Joe Brown

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