NEW YORK, May 5, 2009 – Timothy Rice, David Bell and Gurnam Singh, all with Alstom in Rugby, UK, will be honored by ASME. They are being recognized for a co-authored paper titled “Identification of the Stability Margin Between Safe Operation and the Onset of Blade Flutter.” They will receive ASME’s Gas Turbine Award.
The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the literature of combustion gas turbines or gas turbines thermally combined with nuclear or steam power plants. It will be presented to the authors during the ASME Turbo Expo 2009, which is being held in Orlando, Fla., June 8-12, and is presented by the ASME International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI).
Rice has worked in the development laboratories since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and energy studies from University College Cardiff, UK, in 1981. He has followed a technical career progression, within the company’s relatively new Expert Development Program, qualifying in the area of unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity. He currently works on turbine validation.
Bell graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Durham, UK, in 1994. He continued his studies, sponsored by Alstom, and graduated in 1998 with a Ph.D. specializing in unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity in turbomachines. He then joined Alstom as an engineer in their steam turbine aerodynamics department. He has held positions of increasing responsibility; since 2007, Bell is manager of Alstom’s technical tendering department for steam turbine retrofits.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1977, Singh worked in industry for a short period before embarking on an industrial-based Ph.D. He earned his doctorate (thermal cycling in compact plate type heat exchangers) from the Polytechnic of Wolverhampton, UK, in 1981 and joined Alstom as a research and development engineer. He worked on condensers briefly before moving to computational fluid dynamics code development and blade design related to steam and gas turbines as well as compressors. Currently, he is a project manager for blading for next generation high performance machines.
The co-authored paper describes a numerical and experimental investigation focused on the issue of flutter in last stage moving blades in steam turbines. It describes the use of numerical methods to develop an understanding of how new design features could lead to flutter and to identify operational conditions at which flutter might occur. The authors then conducted an experiment to validate the predictions and to also verify that flutter would not occur in the test article used for the experiment. The paper shows how numerical and experimental methods can complement one another in furthering the understanding of complex phenomena in advanced turbomachinery components.
Founded in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME is a not-for-profit professional organization promoting the art, science and practice of mechanical and multidisciplinary engineering and allied sciences.
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