Turbine technology | GT design: radical rethink


The Openiano Gas Turbine aims to address the shortcomings of conventional gas turbine design, resulting in significantly higher efficiency, much lower emissions simplified materials requirements and improved manufacturability. Design features include a non-integral compressor (ie, decoupling of compression from the turbine core), use of impulse-based turbine architecture with Pelton-style blades and 12 combustion chambers that ignite sequentially 1.5 seconds apart creating an unprecedented 18-second combustion cycle


Renato Openiano Orentrix, USA


The Openiano Gas Turbine (OGT) represents a fundamentally new approach to gas turbine design — one aimed at addressing the most persistent inefficiencies, emissions challenges, and supply-chain constraints facing the power generation sector today. Rather than incrementally refining legacy architectures, the Openiano Gas Turbine rethinks compression, combustion, energy storage and conversion into mechanical power.


The result is a gas turbine system capable of achieving up to 80% greater fuel efficiency, while simultaneously reducing emissions, simplifying materials requirements, and improving durability. The architecture is designed not only for high efficiency but also for manufacturability, scalability, and long-term operational resilience.


Eliminating the largest source of gas turbine efficiency loss In conventional gas turbines, the integral compressor represents the single largest source of inefficiency. Typically, 50–70% of a turbine’s own power output is consumed internally to compress incoming air before combustion. To illustrate the magnitude of this loss, consider a nominal 200 MW gas turbine. In theory, such a machine produces enough power to provide approximately 300–340 MW of generating capacity. However, 100–140 MW is immediately diverted to drive the compressor, leaving only a fraction available for external power generation. The OGT architecture eliminates this fundamental inefficiency by decoupling compression from the turbine core. Instead of an integral compressor, for a 200 MW OGT, compressed air is supplied by a commercial, industrial-grade, two-stage rotary screw compressor — for example, the 300 HP Kaishan KRSP2-300 shown in Figure 1 (or equivalent) — with a total electrical consumption of only ~220 kW. Let that sink in:


● Conventional gas turbine compressor load: 100–140 MW


● OGT compressor power consumption: ~0.22 MW


The energy savings are not marginal—they are orders of magnitude. This architectural shift alone delivers a substantial portion of the OGT’s fuel-efficiency gains and fundamentally alters the energy balance of the gas-turbine system.


The major advantages of non- integral components The Openiano Gas Turbine is deliberately


Air-ejector array Pressure tank (combusted fuel)


123456789 10 11 12


Rotary screw air compressor


High pressure air and fuel


Non integral compressor and sequential combustion over 12 combustion chambers.


engineered with non-integral, modular components — including an industrial-grade rotary screw compressor (as already mentioned), discrete combustion chambers, and a standalone turbine section. This architecture delivers exceptional robustness while dramatically simplifying servicing, maintenance, and long-term lifecycle management.


Unlike conventional gas turbines, where critical components are fully integrated and failures often require the replacement or factory return of the entire turbine, the OGT’s modular design allows individual components to be serviced, repaired, or replaced independently. What would constitute a major — and costly — outage for a traditional turbine is, in many cases, a straightforward and localised repair for the OGT.


The result is higher operational availability, reduced downtime, lower maintenance costs, and a fundamentally more resilient power generation system — engineered for real world reliability and rapid recovery.


Impulse turbine architecture using Pelton blades


Traditional gas turbines rely on airfoil-shaped blades that extract energy from expanding, high-temperature combustion gases. While this approach has been refined over decades,


32 | March 2026 | www.modernpowersystems.com


practical maximum efficiencies typically remain below 70%, with a significant share of input energy lost as waste heat. The OGT replaces this paradigm with an impulse-based turbine architecture using Pelton-style blades, long proven in high-efficiency hydropower applications. Pelton blades convert kinetic energy through direct impulse, rather than relying on pressure drop and thermal expansion. Under appropriate operating conditions, Pelton-style impulse turbines can achieve efficiencies approaching 90%, enabling a far higher proportion of input energy to be converted into mechanical torque. By shifting from thermal expansion to impulse-driven energy transfer, the OGT substantially improves mechanical conversion efficiency while reducing thermal stress throughout the turbine.


Ultra-high-velocity water-jet energy conversion


At the core of the OGT turbine system is a novel air-ejector array that enables ultra-high-velocity water-jet energy conversion. Each air-ejector operates by:


● using high-pressure combusted gas as the motive force;


● injecting high-pressure water from a dedicated reservoir;


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45