Kentaro Takagi

Recent Upgrading and Life Extension Technologies for Existing Steam Turbines

Electricity generation utilities are increasingly looking for cost-effective solutions to maximise the value of aging steam turbine generator plant assets. To this end, retrofits of steam turbines after many years of operation have been carried out for the purpose of life extension of units, performance improvements, capacity up-rating, availability improvement, and improved environmental compliance. Major steam turbine manufacturers have continued to push forward the development of advanced technologies to satisfy demand from utilities by provided retrofit design that optimise the above criteria. This paper describes the advanced technologies adopted in the recent retrofits, including advanced steam path design and new last stage blades of improved efficiency, improved reliability, and of simplified or no maintenance. Retrofit case-studies of capacity up-rating and life extension are introduced to illustrate how these technologies have been applied and what has been the gain.Copyright

Automatic property visualization for material survey support

Engineers in the semiconductor domain are spending significant time searching for materials with certain properties, such as carrier mobility and bandgap values within certain ranges, or to keep informed about newly discovered materials with desirable properties. Since these searches are not anchored in keywords, the usual information retrieval tools are of limited utility. In this paper, we propose a novel system that enables engineers to more efficiently conduct bibliographic surveys in the domain of semiconductor device materials. The system uses large-scale statistical learning and inference to extract relations between materials and their physical properties from text, and visualizes them.