I know exactly what that looks like lol. 99% of the field failures I've seen are a lack of routine maintenance because it wasn't "in the budget". Let them sit in a farm field all year untouched and then fire them up on a moments notice when they need the "peaker" to help keep up with demand. Routine maintenance is cheap compared to what I/we bill out at lol

...........

Wow.. Your a Dik Rik..

So these boats are running turbines that are 21 ft long and weight 10300 lbs?

Classy

…but he has the most lovely wife that more than makes up for his indiscretions :).

Seriously though, he is correct in that there are many applications where SMALL turbines are installed in less than perfect operating environments due to their high specific power. My understanding is the Abrams utilise elaborate multi-stage filters (which of course are conspicuous by their absence in the race boats). I can’t comment on each turbine’s physical shock load endurance but the vertical accelerations planing hulls exert on anything rigidly connected to them whilst travelling at high speeds on rough water are almost unparalleled -save for perhaps carrier landings. However I don’t have the numbers for the carrier landings either so it may be that these shock loads are in fact within a given turbine’s design specification. Perhaps someone with direct turbine design engineering experience can educate us here. In any event I think the point is turbines of all sizes have been proven to work reliably and safely in many environments provided their installation and operating parameters are properly engineered.

ND1

...and a hell-uv-a track dryer!

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.45364...7&rs=1&pid=1.7

http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.46009...7&rs=1&pid=1.7

:CH1P: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5...by-gt500-3.jpg

And that's exactly the point. This is not a trash the turbines thread, but it is a call out to determine why the problems have happened and what can be done to prevent them in the future.

One point of note here is that all of the talk around the Abrams fails to recognise the 'gynormous" DOD budget that went into perfecting the design and the uncountable man years of engineering behind the entire tank program. We must be keenly aware that a rather small bunch of boat racer/runners have waded into the deep water of turbine technology (no pun intended) with nowhere near the resources used in developing these motors in the first place. Therefore I agree that we should find and leverage the best data available on fire suppression and avoidance in military, aircraft, and other turbine implementations. Obviously , each time we board a jet or turbo prop plane we feel secure in the knowledge that fire avoidance and suppression systems work seamlessly around the world on a 24/7 basis in these aircraft. The Geico guys are, as usual, out front in this, but it looks like there is still ample room between the current state of the art in high speed marine turbine applications and the established safety norms for real world turbine usage.

You understand the obvious point of my post.

The air induction system on the Abrams was a big challenge and underwent a number of changes during prototype, pilot and into fielding. surprisingly those changes had to do with filter/airbox seals vs the actual filter elements. The system has two stages, a fan driven large particle pre-cleaner feeding into the three cleanable air filters in the airbox up stream from the turbine bell mouth. The system does have a significant space claim but again consider the environment. And again the Abrams burns DF-2.