Why Are The Marine Gas Turbines Of The Russian Navy Unbearable For A Long Time?

Marine gas turbines and aviation jet engines are closely related. Both use gas to drive the turbine to do work to generate propulsion power; the hot end of the marine gas turbine is almost the same as the aero engine, and it can even be used directly. However, there is one big difference between marine gas turbines and aviation jet engines. It is the aero engine that emphasizes the reverse thrust of the backward jet. But what marine gas turbine needs is the torque of mechanical rotation. Because of these differences, marine gas turbines have additional cold ends; and a complex gear reduction system is required to reduce the mechanical energy of marine gas turbines at high speeds and increase torque to drive the ship’s main shaft to perform power propulsion. Marine gas turbines have become popular since the 1960s. It first appeared in the Western Surface Destroyer Fleet led by the U.S. Navy as the main engine. The gas turbine has inherent advantages as the main engine of the destroyer and frigate. The first is that the power rises very quickly, and it only takes five or six minutes to reach full power from an idle state.

It takes less than 10 minutes from the cold state to the full power state. The previous steam oil-fired boiler power requires more than 20 minutes to accelerate from low speed to high speed; it also takes 1 to 2 hours from complete cooling to start-up. Therefore, a ship with a gas turbine as the main engine is particularly suitable for quickly transitioning from a cruising state to a high-speed combat state, and it is also suitable for quickly sailing in the port upon receiving an order. The second advantage is that gas turbines spin at high speeds. Although there are whistling noises caused by spins, most of them are short-band noises. The characteristic of noise propagation in water is that the longer the waveband, the farther it spreads. This has resulted in gas turbine warships also having inherent advantages in avoiding submarines and anti-submarine. The third advantage is that gas turbines occupies much smaller space in the ship compared with fuel-steam power and diesel power of the same power, and the working environment is clean and the daily maintenance workload is small. Hanhai Langshan (Xiongnu Langshan) believes that these characteristics are more and more common in newly-built warships. However, the biggest weakness of marine gas turbines is their high fuel consumption, low combustion efficiency, and particularly low efficiency at idle speed.

In order to solve the problem of idling speed, many ships use a combination of gas turbine and diesel engine. Only the diesel engine is activated during low-speed cruising, and the gas turbine is activated during combat. Precisely because of the natural connection between marine gas turbines and aero engines, in the Cold War era, manufacturers that could produce large and medium-sized marine gas turbines were basically the same period of aircraft jet engine manufacturers. Such as GE and Rolls-Royce. In the Soviet era, the company that could produce marine gas turbines was mainly Sugon Mechanical Design Consortium, which was later directly renamed Sugon. This design office is located in the city of Nikolaev on the Black Sea, which is the city where the Soviet shipyard that produced the Kurdish ship and the predecessor of the 001 is located. But in the Cold War era, relative to GE and Rolls-Royce. Sugon's products have many problems. At that time, most of the large ships of the Soviet Navy, from destroyers and large anti-submarine ships to nuclear-powered cruisers, including aircraft-carrying cruisers, almost all used fuel-steam-powered main engines. This has caused Sugon's gas turbine environment to be squeezed out. Almost any engine is a proven science, and only the more it is used, the more extensive it is, the better the product quality and product performance can be.

In the Soviet era, most of Sugon's gas turbines could only be applied to small surface ships and even non-mainstream naval ships such as hovercraft and wingcraft. The quality of Sugon's products is immature, and even some mainstream large gas turbines are only semi-finished products. After so-and-so bought some of these designs, it took years of technical perfection to finally take the lead. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was not so lucky. After independence, the Sugon Company was separated to Ukraine, and Ukraine did not produce any new destroyers after independence, so some gas turbines could only be sold to Russia to build frigates.

However, the two sides fell out after 2015. Many Russian frigates that have built hulls instantly cut off the supply of gas turbines. In desperation, Russia can only announce an "import substitution" strategy, allowing Saturn, which produces jet engines in its own country, to rebuild marine gas turbines. The index requirements put forward by its navy are too high, and the efficiency of the Sugon gas turbine must be increased from 32% to 36% in one step. This is obviously very unrealistic. As mentioned earlier, marine gas engines also have systems such as huge cold ends and transmission gears that are not available in aircraft engines. For Saturn, which has just re-developed and suffered a serious brain drain, the target is too high, but it is too fast to reach it.