Draft:Terry Steam Turbine

The Terry Steam Turbine is a small, single-stage, compound-velocity impulse turbine originally designed and manufactured by the Terry Steam Turbine Company. These turbines are known globally for their ruggedness and reliability and are used in a variety of energy transmission applications.

History of Terry Steam Turbine Company

Edward Clinton Terry, son of James Terry, was born in Terryville, Connecticut on December 10th, 1850. His father, James Terry born in 1823, was a former member of the Connecticut legislature and part founder of Eagle Lock Company of Terryville, a village of Plymouth, Connecticut. His company became the dominant manufacturer of cabinet locks, trunk locks, padlocks, and specialty locks in the world. His mother was Elizabeth Terry, née Hollister. E.C. Terry was the grandson of Eli Terry, Jr., and great-grandson of Eli Terry Sr., who is considered throughout the world as the father of American mass-production of clocks.

E. C. Terry graduated from Yale school of Civil Engineering in 1871. From 1871 to 1873, Terry worked as a Rodman for the Easthampton Branch of the Connecticut River Railroad. He was also a surveyor of the reservoirs for the water supply of Hartford, Connecticut. His first ever patents were for both a rotary and a piston water meter. In 1880 he became associated and later became Secretary and proprietor of Hartford, Connecticut Meter Company, a company formed to manufacture water meters of his own invention. Having successfully applied his idea of transmitting electric power over long distances by means of wire, E. C. Terry founded the Farmington River Power Company for the transmission of electric power to Hartford Electric Light Company, HELCO, from Farmington River to Hartford, a distance of twelve miles. This was the first long distance power plant in the United States, and of this, he was Secretary and a Director of the organization until his death in 1908.

After establishing the Oil City Generating Station in 1890 as the laboratory of the Farmington River Power Company, E. C. Terry devoted his experimental work in power generation to steam turbines, receiving patents for high-speed versions in 1893 and 1899, and for low-speed designs in 1900, 1903, 1905 and 1908. After perfecting a low-speed turbine in 1906, he incorporated Terry Steam Turbine Company in Windsor, CT outside of Hartford, CT in 1906, of which he was President. In 1907 Terry engaged mill architect George B. Allen to design his plant and Berlin Construction Co. to build it. Completed in 1908, the high one-story factory, originally 200' x 80', had steel framing and brick-pier walls and there were three long bays with a monitor over the central bay.

Terry Steam Turbine Company operated here until the mid-1960s. Early orders included eight 300-horsepower turbines that drove boiler feed pumps at New York Edison Co.'s Waterside No.2 Plant. After E.C. Terry died of pneumonia in 1908, his son named after E.C.’s father, James Terry, Yale class of 1895, ran the company thereafter. James Terry tapped the military market, selling vertical turbines to the United States Navy for driving forced draft fans in destroyers. The original plant was lengthened by 230' in 1911 to accommodate expanded production from Navy orders.

Legacy Businesses, Mergers and Acquisitions

In 1916 in Wellsville, NY, about 6 hours away from the Terry enterprise, James Leonard Moore had left Kerr Steam Turbine Company and formed the Moore Steam Turbine Company. Significant improvements in design and new developments were achieved at Moore’s new company, including cam operated automatic nozzle control, two and four valve automatic extraction control, solid rotor, and double flow exhaust. Many of these features are still used in today’s turbine applications throughout multiple industries.

In 1937, Worthington Pump and Machinery Corporation purchased Moore Steam Turbine Company. Henry R. Worthington, inventor of direct acting reciprocating steam pump and manufacturer of heavy industrial equipment, founded Worthington in 1840.  After the merger of Studebaker and Worthington in 1967, the Steam Turbine Division became Worthington Turbine International Division and continued to manufacture steam turbines and jet gas peaking units. In 1968 Terry Steam Turbine purchased the assets of Whiton Machine Company. This provided a great foundation for expanding their shipboard product line. In 1970, Terry Steam Turbine acquired Holwarth and Kuhnert Turbinen in Oberhausen, West Germany, further expanding to the European markets.

In 1970, Worthington Turbine International and Electric Machinery Manufacturing Company, both Studebaker subsidiaries, combined to form Turbodyne Corporation.  

In 1974, Ingersoll-Rand bought Terry Steam Turbine Company, making it the company’s subsidiary.

In 1979, McGraw Edison Company purchased Studebaker Worthington, making Turbodyne part of a major international company. Turbodyne was made part of the Worthington Group in 1981, along with Worthington Pumps and Compressors.

In 1984, a new Turbodyne Division was formed by McGraw Edison. Later that year, the newly formed division was acquired by Dresser Industries.  

The Dresser Clark Company was created from the 1938 merger of the Solomon R. Dresser Company, founded in Bradford, Pennsylvania and the Clark Brothers Company, founded in 1880 in Belmont, New York which moved to Olean, New York in 1912.

The Dresser Clark Company, which was incorporated in 1956 as Dresser Industries, manufactured steam, diesel, and reciprocating engines as well as centrifugal compressors in Olean, and in a facility in Le Havre, France. Dresser Industries acquired the Wellsville, NY plant in 1985, and after a merger with Ingersoll-Rand, which was the OEM for the Terry Turbines, in 1987, the company was renamed Dresser-Rand.

In 1994, Dresser-Rand purchased General Electric’s government business, including the main engine systems of US Navy aircraft carriers and other auxiliary equipment. By 2007, they further expanded their reach by purchasing Gimpel from Tyco Flow Control. Dresser-Rand was now manufacturing the main steam root valves for US Navy submarine programs and main engine guardian valves for US Navy aircraft carrier programs.

In 2015, Dresser-Rand, then headquartered out of Houston, TX, was sold to the conglomerate Siemens Energy AG, based out of Munich, Germany for $7.6 billion. The business unit Siemens Government Technologies (SGT) supported the Dress-Rand legacy operations left in Wellsville, NY.

In 2018, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, a company consolidated in 1929 from Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company and Wright Aeronautical along with 12 other companies, purchased the Dresser-Rand legacy government business, including the Terry Turbine and G.E. Naval heritage product lines from Siemens Government Technologies for $212.5 million.

The sale included the Government business unit and 3 service centers. Later in the year 2018, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation announced the creation of the Steam & Air Solutions (SAS) and Fleet Solutions business units to both operate within the Curtiss-Wright Electro-Mechanical Services (EMS) Division to support the legacy operations. The primary factory relocated from Wellsville, NY to Summerville, SC in 2020.

Emergency Service Applications

There are currently 200-250 Curtiss-Wright branded Terry Steam Turbines deployed in nuclear facilities worldwide in safety critical applications:

• Boiling Water Reactors (BWR)
  • Reactor Core Isolation Cooling (RCIC)
  • High Pressure Coolant Injection (HPCI)

For the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) design, a smaller sized 600 gpm feed pump is typically attached to a smaller Terry Turbine, while some other designs have a larger 6000 gpm emergency core cooling pump driven by a larger Terry Turbine. The smaller system is called RCIC (“rick-see”) or Reactor Core Isolation Cooling and the larger system is called HPCI (“hip-see”) or High-Pressure Coolant Injection. The HPCI system is designed to inject enough water to manage a 1-inch hole in the reactor or steamlines, which causes inventory loss but doesn't depressurize the reactor, while RCIC system is designed for an intact reactor vessel and is simply there to make up for decay boiling. The Terry Turbine drive takes steam directly from the reactor and discharges the exhaust back into the containment suppression pool to quench it. It can draw a suction from a storage tank or from the suppression pool. With RCIC in operation, a BWR can be kept in hot standby for days or more while repairs are made to the Balance of Plant (BOP) or steam plant.

• Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR)
  • Turbine Driven Auxiliary FeedWater Systems (TDAFW)

The Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) variety is typically closer to 1200 gpm pump. If a PWR loses main feedwater, the emergency feedwater system starts up. Depending on the plant design, you typically have some combination of motor driven, Terry Turbine driven, and diesel engine driven emergency feedwater pumps. These pumps inject to the steam generators to create adequate heat sink for the reactor.

The steam generators then dump steam to the atmosphere to help control reactor temperatures in order to cool the plant down. They typically draw suction from a storage tank or a feeding body of water. In both plant designs, the use of a Terry Turbine means that you have a way to inject auxiliary feed water even with no electric power. You can black start the turbines manually or start them remotely using the governor controls.

In a real-life emergency situation, Terry Turbines are responsible for preventing several reactors in Japan from melting down during the March 2011 earthquake, like the second Fukushima Daini site about 15 miles south from the main Daiichi site, where all power was lost and RCIC Terry Turbines kept the four reactors safe until heat removal pumps could be restored. Even at the main Fukushima reactor plant, the unit that melted first did not have a functional Terry Turbine, the other two units had theirs running for 2-3 days before they failed. The steam driven pumps provided cooling water to reactors 2 and 3 and prevented their fuel rods from overheating, as the rods continued to generate decay heat after fission had ceased. Eventually these pumps stopped working, and the reactors began to overheat.

In today’s world, the Commercial Nuclear Terry Turbine product line is now primarily an aftermarket business. The Terry Turbine is not included in the new AP-1000 Gen 3 reactor design or any new SMR designs, and although there is steady interest in the Nuclear Energy sector, the growth is relatively minimal for building new large plant designs. With the aging life cycle of the reactors, Nuclear Power Plants approaching license expiration are faced with three options: obtain initial license renewal to continue operations, obtain subsequent license renewal, or discontinue operations. By 2040, more than half of the U.S.’s 95 operating reactors will have reached the end of their current license period.