Development and Construction of a New Series of Impeller Profiles for Steam Turbines.

For Brown, Boveri steam turbines, five series of profiles have been in use over a period of eighty years. The profile 1000, which was introduced starting from 1950, was superior to the preceding profiles from the points of view of efficiency and strength, but because of limited possibilities could be optimized only incompletely. Only the advent of EDP made it possible to optimize the new profile series with an unlimited number of parameters; then economic and manufacturing points of view could be taken into account, and modern methods of data analysis were applied. On the whole the development of the 8000 profile from the statement of the problem up to the manufacture of the first impellers took about ten years.