FEATURE
The New Dawn of Turbomachinery
Often operating sight unseen, turbomachinery keeps modern industries moving. As society enters another energy transition, new advances are on the horizon.
Written by F. Todd Davidson and Michael E. Webber
Gas turbine rotor installation at a combined cycle power plant. Video: Getty Images
OVER THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY, turbomachinery stands out as one of the most important—and less obvious—inventions that have enabled the modern world. From airplanes to thermal power plants, power drills to rocket engines, industrial machines to medical devices, and more, turbomachinery has provided humans with the ability to convert energy into useful work to build, fix, process, and transport everything around us. The invention of turbomachinery was an inflection point.
A new age of electrification and industrialization is pushing turbomachinery demand higher. And as orders surge to support the needs of artificial intelligence (AI), manufacturing, electric vehicles, and more, a turbomachinery renaissance is underway.
A Turbine is Born
In the late 18th century, humanity was on the cusp of a technological transition that forever changed the world: the advent of turbomachinery. John Barber was issued a patent in 1791 with the key components of a gas turbine engine: a compressor (to elevate the working fluid’s pressure), a combustion chamber (to elevate the working fluid’s temperature), and a turbine to extract useful work via a rotating shaft. Barber’s goal was to create a horseless carriage. In the process, he laid the groundwork for machines that would revolutionize the world.
Charles Parsons developed the steam turbine in 1884. To this day, the steam turbine remains the most common technology used to convert heat from nuclear reactions and combustion into useful work to produce electricity.
In 1930, Frank Whittle of England patented the use of gas turbine engines for aviation. Whittle’s design was demonstrated in 1937 and flight-tested in 1941. In parallel, Hans von Ohain of Germany flight-tested his own engine design in 1939 with support from the Heinkel Aircraft Company. With their innovations, Whittle and von Ohain ushered in the era of jet-powered flight as the world was reeling under the strains of World War II.
F. Todd Davidson
Michael E. Webber
Students at Lutterworth Gas Turbine College, where Frank Whittle made his early power jet experiments, attending a course in gas turbine technology in June 1948. Photo: Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Flash forward nearly 80 years and turbomachinery remains one of the keystones supporting the modern world. More than 40 percent of primary energy conversion in the United States is accomplished with gas and steam turbines powered by coal, natural gas, jet fuel, and enriched uranium, most of which is used to produce electricity. Steam turbines supply more than 50 percent of electricity in the United States and are responsible for nearly half of daily water withdrawals to cool the steam back into liquid form.
The use of gas turbines in the electricity sector has grown rapidly during the past 40 years due to the ability to build combined cycle power plants, which can achieve efficiencies greater than 60 percent, far higher than the 25–40 percent efficiency typical for traditional steam turbine systems. Gas turbines on their own are also popular for delivering smaller, flexible power plants (i.e., “peaker plants”) that can quickly ramp up and down to balance supply and demand on the grid. Gas turbines—operating with jet fuel similar to kerosene—are the dominant technology used for aviation propulsion.
Turbomachinery’s contributions don’t stop there. Wind turbines now supply more than 10 percent of domestic electricity in the United States. Hydroelectric and geothermal steam turbines provide another 5 percent of electricity. Turbomachinery is also found in all large pipeline networks, refineries, and many industrial plants that move, convert, and produce the critical chemicals and products that we need.
Medical equipment also relies on turbomachinery. Centrifugal pumps are used to circulate blood for dialysis and other treatments. And the high pitch sound you hear at the dentist when they are cleaning your teeth? That is a small pneumatic turbine inside the head of the tool, spinning at hundreds of thousands of RPMs. So, the next time you get your teeth cleaned or a family member gets a dialysis treatment, be thankful for turbomachinery.
Chart: Our World in Data
Photo: Getty Images
A combined cycle power plant. Photo: Getty Images
Exceptional Capabilities
These rotating machines are critical to the modern economy. Gas turbines for jet flight and electricity production provide exceptional power density, capable of delivering tens of kilowatts in a device no larger than a toaster. To put that in perspective, high end gas turbine engines can deliver nearly ten times the power of a similarly sized internal combustion engine.
Gas turbines also deliver high levels of reliability. Consider that the longest commercial flight in the world travels nonstop from New York City to Singapore, completing a 9,500-mile flight with only two engines. Engines that can consistently, safely, and efficiently deliver passengers across the world are an exceptional feat of engineering.
Such reliability carries over to the electric grid, where turbomachinery can help stabilize entire systems. At the simplest level, the grid can be thought of as a set of scales, where the electricity supply and demand must be balanced in real time. If either supply or demand rises or drops too much, the system can fall out of balance and cascade into failure. Turbines can quickly ramp up or down to smooth out disturbances and keep the entire grid balanced.
With a reliable fuel supply, turbomachinery can provide critical services during emergencies. The steam turbines in nuclear power plants, for example, can run continuously for 18 to 24 months before the plant must be shut down for refueling. In nuclear powered submarines, turbomachinery can operate for many years at a time.
Photo: Getty Images
Driving Innovation
Innovation in the turbomachinery field continues to push the limits of engineering. Turbines are getting both larger and smaller, depending on the application. Gas turbines are being outfitted with newer materials, from novel metals to ceramics, and innovative manufacturing processes are enabling unique designs to protect against the resulting higher temperatures. The move toward higher temperatures is motivated by the thermodynamic reality that hotter engines are more efficient.
To put the importance of efficiency in perspective, consider that a 1 percent increase in installed gas turbine efficiency for the existing power generation fleet would provide enough additional electricity for 5 million typical U.S. homes and save more than $1 billion per year in natural gas costs. In addition, a 1 percent increase in jet engine efficiency could save more than $1 billion per year in jet fuel costs in the U.S. alone.
Unfortunately, the goal of increasing engine temperature (and thus efficiency) comes with significant impacts. High performance gas turbine engines are already operating at temperatures that exceed the limitations of many of the materials that are inside the engine. To put it another way, if it weren’t for some very creative engineering, the engine would literally destroy itself.
Pricing history for U.S. Gulf Coast kerosene-type jet fuel from May 2021 through May 2026. Chart: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, citing U.S. Energy Information Administration
Photo: Getty Images
As expected, the hottest location in the engine is immediately downstream from the combustor. The first stages of components (i.e., rotors and stators, sometimes also called blades, buckets, and vanes) in the turbine must be capable of enduring this extreme environment for long durations. For some engines, this could mean designing components that must survive temperatures beyond 1,500 °C (2,732 °F).
Making matters worse, the temperature is not the only challenging design constraint. The components must be able to endure corrosive combustion byproducts, ingestion of sand and other foreign objects (including birds), maintain tolerances for oil seals despite significant thermal expansion (consider the dramatic changes that a fighter jet must endure across its entire mission profile, from sitting idle in an arctic hangar to outmaneuvering an adversary in the skies above a hot desert), and survive the continuous vibration of engine operation.
The engine’s rotating components are also under significant mechanical stress. The root of a spinning blade transfers the force of the component to the central axis of the engine to power the compressor and, in the case of electricity generation, the generator. The forces on the rotating component can exceed 20,000 times the force of its own weight under the acceleration of gravity.
In short, the engineers facing this challenge must design a component that can resist extraordinary forces while bathed in temperatures that far exceed the melting thresholds of the world’s best metals.
On the Forefront
To surmount these challenges and achieve successful design, engineers combine multiple strategies. First, improve the underlying metal structure that would give the components the necessary mechanical strength. Second, integrate active cooling for each component to ensure it can survive temperatures that exceed the limits of the underlying metal. And finally, coat the components in a thermal barrier that provides additional protection from the high temperatures along with critical protection from highly reactive and corrosive combustion products.
Engineers turned to advanced alloys to improve the underlying structure. Historically, these alloys were forged or machined into the necessary engine components. Advanced nickel alloys were a critical inflection point toward improving the performance of gas turbine engines. A major breakthrough came when components were grown as a single metallic crystal with no grain boundaries—an extraordinary feat of engineering. The crystalline design helped minimize structural and chemical inconsistencies that undermine the durability of the component.
New ways to integrate active cooling draw relatively cool air (which still might be many hundreds of degrees Celsius) off the compressor and route it to the interior of turbine components. That air is used to cool inside the blades and vanes. Small, precise holes punched or laser cut into components’ walls then allow that air to bleed out over the surface, forming a thin film of relatively cooler gas that serves as a barrier to provide additional thermal resistance between the high temperatures in the hot gas path and the wall of the component. This process, called film cooling, helps provide internal and external cooling of the component walls. The shape of these holes was and remains a critical design choice to improve how the film coolant spreads across the external surface of the components.
The thermal barrier coating is the other critical step to improve the lifetime of the turbine components. Coatings are made from ceramics, such as yttria-stabilized zirconia, that have a low thermal conductivity and are resistant to corrosion. However, like all ceramics, they are more brittle than metals and could not, on their own, endure the forces to which turbine components are subjected. But, by combining high performance metals with thermal barrier coatings and active cooling—high temperature resistance from ceramics and high strength and malleability from metals—engineers have harnessed the best of both worlds to produce turbine components that can survive in extreme environments.
A diagram revealing the internal workings of a gas turbine. Image: ME recreation referencing images from Britannica, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Wikimedia Commons
A gas turbine vane with film cooling holes. The surface of the component is coated in a thermal barrier coating. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The search for the next great innovations that will enable even higher temperatures and thus, higher efficiencies, continues. Some of those pathways include the development of ceramic matrix composites and 3D printing of components with ceramic materials. These approaches hold promise in creating components that have the high temperature, high anti-corrosion benefits of ceramics while still having sufficient mechanical strength to survive in an engine.
Incorporating ceramic components has the added benefit of reducing the required amount of coolant, which cuts the parasitic draw of air from the compressor, further improving engine performance. Where further cooling is still needed, 3D printing can help. The technology’s ability to manufacture geometries that incorporate unique cooling designs is another innovation pathway that has produced valuable performance gains and continues to hold promise for additional improvements.
Modern gas turbines are also adopting a wider range of fuels to meet a variety of design goals, including flexibility to shift to different fuels for economic or strategic purposes as well as various domestic and international policy goals to adopt fuels with fewer emissions. While the United States has significant hydrocarbon supplies, the energy disruptions from the 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz are a reminder of the security value of fuel flexibility.
Unconventional fuels include hydrogen, hydrogen blends, biofuels, ammonia, and synthetic hydrocarbons. Many of these fuels are prohibitively expensive today and will require combustion chamber redesigns, along with additional efforts to reimagine what midstream and distribution infrastructure would need to be for safe handling. Despite those challenges, research into many of these fuels continues for a variety of economic, technical, and policy reasons.
One of the technological forefronts of gas turbine engineering is the use of supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) as the working fluid in the cycle, rather than air. While immense challenges remain, the use of sCO₂ presents an opportunity to leverage CO₂’s relatively large mass to enable turbines one-tenth the size of conventional turbomachinery components. This innovation opens opportunities to drive down the cost of power plant components, for example, by creating the entire rotor, compressor, and turbine system out of a single part. Furthermore, these designs could enable the efficiency of a power plant to rise by up to 10 percent, meaning more of the energy in finite fossil fuel resources could be converted directly to the services that humanity needs to thrive (e.g., electricity).
We need to continue to drive innovation forward to meet the growing needs of the world.
Time to Accelerate
Increasing demand for electricity to power the electrification of buildings, vehicles, and the growth of AI is forcing the world to recognize the importance of turbomachinery. This fact can be clearly seen in the multi-year turbine order backlogs.
In an April 2026 earnings call, GE Vernova (GEV) reported that their backlog for gas turbines has surged to 100 GW, up from 50 GW the year prior, which was already up from approximately 20 GW in 2024. To put 100 GW in perspective, the total installed electricity generation capacity of the United States (across all energy conversion technologies) is approximately 1,300 GW (i.e., GEV’s backlog is equivalent to nearly 8 percent of the entire U.S. generating capacity, as of March 2026). GE Vernova’s backlog is expected to extend past 2030. And in parallel, prices are projected to rise nearly threefold by 2027, compared to 2019 prices.
Similar stories of growth can be seen with all major gas turbine manufacturers, including Siemens, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Solar Turbines (owned by Caterpillar), and Baker Hughes. The most urgent demand is coming from the technology sector to power the data centers that promise to unlock a new level of AI. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, among others, are all racing to deploy gigawatts of computing power.
Photo: Getty Images
Chart: S&P Global
However, the backlog for gas turbines is growing faster than new manufacturing capacity can come online, despite customer willingness to pay top dollar. A major reason for this chokepoint in the supply chain is because only a few firms in the world can manufacture the uniquely complex vanes and blades for the first stages of a high temperature gas turbine.
So how will we accelerate?
In recent decades, it has taken multiple years to improve efficiency by 1 percent for the latest combined cycle gas turbine systems, often with diminishing returns. The current demand for energy is going to require innovation and manufacturing growth cycles measured in the order of months, not years. And, because the society-wide impact is so significant, research and development to advance the capability of turbomachinery should remain a central priority for corporations and government agencies.
A misconception about innovation and commercialization is that it unfolds in an elegant, orderly way from science to engineering to manufacturing to market. But this perception belies the truth that progress often requires a non-linear, convoluted path where mistakes are made, questions are posed, and new learning is unlocked. It is through the process of building that we will inevitably unlock additional innovation that will allow us to move faster. The world has seen this trend transpire with transistors, solar panels, batteries, and more. Performance improvements and cost savings are found as competitive firms scale production. And sometimes the science follows the innovation.
In fact, the importance of building can be seen in the history of steam engines and turbomachinery. Inventors like Savery, Newcomen, and Watt knew that higher pressures and temperatures could achieve higher power output from steam engines, but they didn’t know why. The process of building the engines forced future engineers and physicists to wrestle with the fundamental laws that govern the behavior of an engine. Humanity unlocked innovation by building first and explaining second.
As noted by historian Bruce Hunt: “Historians of science and technology have often and quite rightly observed that the steam engine did far more for science than science ever did for the steam engine.” Perhaps it will be the same story once more: As we build more turbomachinery to power AI data centers, we are poised to again gain new insights into the universe around us.
The Western world needs to recognize that it is straining not just from the current growth of AI and economic growth, but also under the weight of trillions of dollars in aging infrastructure. It’s time we get very serious about modernizing it. A concerted effort to upgrade and replace all older power plants, compressors, turbines, and more would force us to build more turbomachinery and find the innovations that we need.
Steam engines took us from an agricultural to industrial economy. Turbomachinery delivered the world into modernity. Perhaps we’re at the start of a new age of invention for turbomachinery, which would be good for the world.
Let’s embrace the new dawn.
F. Todd Davidson is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
Michael E. Webber is the Cockrell Family Chair #16 in Engineering and Sid Richardson Chair in Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
Photo: Getty Images
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