Squeeze, Burn, Expand: Gas Turbines from the Brayton Cycle to the Hot Section

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 1m

On a forty-six-degree afternoon, performance engineer Wanjiru Kamau watches an aeroderivative turbine driving a gas export compressor make twenty-three megawatts instead of thirty-one, and has to split the loss into weather, dirt and damage using only the numbers on her screen. Episode one hundred and three builds the gas turbine from a party balloon upwards: the Brayton cycle said in words, why squeezing harder and burning hotter both pay, and why the compressor's huge appetite makes small losses expensive. We trace the history from Neuchâtel's 1939 utility set and the first jet flights of…