5 IN SEARCH OF SPACE Gas turbines are widely deployed with Parker-designed combustion air intake systems in both terrestrial and marine applications including electrical power generation on-land, and mechanical drive on offshore oil and gas production installations. Therefore, air intake filtration, its nuances and particular challenges are well understood. However, on board military vessels, there are additional issues that must be addressed when designing effective air intake filtration systems. In particular, the significant limitations on available physical space. The demands and extreme limits for real estate on military vessels tends to relegate intake filtration systems down the priority list and can see considerations such as accommodating turbine ancillaries developed almost as an afterthought. Consequently, while the air intake filtration system must be effective in terms of ensuring turbine reliability and performance, it must normally achieve this goal while remaining extremely compact, up to 4 times more compact than for a comparable land-based application. Having then developed such a system, many of the world’s navies will commonly deploy multiple iterations of the same design across the fleet. A particular configuration will be specified for the gas turbine propulsion system for relevant vessel types, such as a class of frigate or destroyer, which will then be repeated across all vessels of the same type. Thus, while the vessels may see some updates between hulls, such as accommodation or radar systems and weapons platforms, the design of the turbine and its combustion air intake system may not change throughout the design life of the ship class and there will be multiple deployments across a fleet. In many cases, Parker has delivered more than 20 air intake systems for a particular naval class of vessel. This approach places an absolute premium on the proven long-term performance of the unit and all its related systems. Parker began its GT air intake filtration and system design business within the marine application space, developing compact, high-velocity systems in the 1960s and 1970s that subsequently evolved into today’s market leading Altair-Neptune and Altair-Vega systems. To date Parker have supplied over 750 individual marine vessels with GT intake protection.
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