Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Drax cements position as the cleanest, most efficient power station in the UK as £100m turbine upgrade nears completion

The project, which has taken five years to complete, will enable Drax Power Station to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by one million tons a year, equivalent to taking 275,000 cars off the road.

The increased overall efficiency of almost 40% will also improve reliability and availability in generation output, delivering greater value to the business.

Siemens Energy was awarded the £100 million contract to modernise all six units at the power station in 2007. Over the subsequent five year period, together Drax and Siemens have replaced the low pressure and high pressure turbines on all six units at the power station.

The new turbines, manufactured by Siemens Germany, consist of 28 separate turbine rotors weighing over 2,800 tons, and over 80,000 individualized turbine blades, which, laid end-to-end would stretch the distance of the London marathon.

Darren Davidson, Head of Projects Energy Service Fossil, Siemens Newcastle said, "We are delighted to have been part of this key project for Drax and to have contributed to its carbon emission reduction and efficiency targets so significantly.

Over the past five years, each unit has been delivered successfully and on schedule. We must thank the team at Drax and our colleagues in Newcastle and Mulheim for their cooperative approach".

Amy Pempel | Siemens Energy
Further information:
http://www.siemens.com

Im Focus: Temperature-controlled fiber-optic light source with liquid core

In a recent publication in the renowned journal Optica, scientists of Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena showed that they can accurately control the optical properties of liquid-core fiber lasers and therefore their spectral band width by temperature and pressure tuning.

Already last year, the researchers provided experimental proof of a new dynamic of hybrid solitons– temporally and spectrally stationary light waves resulting...

Im Focus: Overdosing on Calcium

Nano crystals impact stem cell fate during bone formation

Scientists from the University of Freiburg and the University of Basel identified a master regulator for bone regeneration. Prasad Shastri, Professor of...

Im Focus: AchemAsia 2019 will take place in Shanghai

Moving into its fourth decade, AchemAsia is setting out for new horizons: The International Expo and Innovation Forum for Sustainable Chemical Production will take place from 21-23 May 2019 in Shanghai, China. With an updated event profile, the eleventh edition focusses on topics that are especially relevant for the Chinese process industry, putting a strong emphasis on sustainability and innovation.

Founded in 1989 as a spin-off of ACHEMA to cater to the needs of China’s then developing industry, AchemAsia has since grown into a platform where the latest...

Im Focus: First real-time test of Li-Fi utilization for the industrial Internet of Things

The BMBF-funded OWICELLS project was successfully completed with a final presentation at the BMW plant in Munich. The presentation demonstrated a Li-Fi communication with a mobile robot, while the robot carried out usual production processes (welding, moving and testing parts) in a 5x5m² production cell. The robust, optical wireless transmission is based on spatial diversity; in other words, data is sent and received simultaneously by several LEDs and several photodiodes. The system can transmit data at more than 100 Mbit/s and five milliseconds latency.

Modern production technologies in the automobile industry must become more flexible in order to fulfil individual customer requirements.

Im Focus: Sharp images with flexible fibers

An international team of scientists has discovered a new way to transfer image information through multimodal fibers with almost no distortion - even if the fiber is bent. The results of the study, to which scientist from the Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology Jena (Leibniz IPHT) contributed, were published on 6thJune in the highly-cited journal Physical Review Letters.

Endoscopes allow doctors to see into a patient’s body like through a keyhole. Typically, the images are transmitted via a bundle of several hundreds of optical...