Solar Turbines

Headquartered in San Diego, California, USA, Solar Turbines Incorporated, a subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc., is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of industrial gas turbines, with more than 15,000 units and over 2 billion operating hours in over 100 countries.

Products from Solar Turbines play an important role in the development of oil, natural gas and power generation projects around the world. Solar Turbines’ products include gas turbine engines (rated from 1,500-30,000 horsepower), gas compressors, and gas turbine-powered compressor sets, mechanical-drive packages and generator sets (ranging from 1-22 megawatts).

Solar’s customers put the company’s products to work in many areas including production, processing and pipeline transmission of natural gas and crude oil and generation of electricity and thermal energy for processing applications, such as manufacturing chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food products.

Solar’s foundation is people and Solar’s culture is one where individual contributions are valued, diversity in the workplace is encouraged, and safety is emphasized in all aspects of the business. Solar Turbines is comprised of a dedicated and multi-talented workforce of more than 7,500 employees with decades of experience working as a global team.

Products and Services
Products include six gas turbine product families, Saturn^®, Centaur^®, Mercury™, Taurus™, Mars^®, Titan™, and 10 centrifugal gas compressor product families including both pipeline and production compressors. Gas Turbine Products range from 1-22 MW (1500-30,000hp). Solar also manufacturesTurbotronic™ microprocessor-based control systems utilizing PLC technology. Services offered by the Company cover gas turbine and gas compressor overhaul, parts replacement, field service, package refurbishment, and asset management.

Solar sells, manufactures, and services its products from over 43 worldwide locations. Business is conducted through these offices with sales and service employees plus sales representatives and selected distributors. Although 80% of Solar's employees and 85% of the physical assets are located in the U.S., Solar exports more than 70% of its products. Solar is one of the 50 largest exporters in the United States.

Markets
Solar participates in two major market segments:

- Oil and Gas Production and Transmission (O&G),
- Power Generation (PG)

An essential requirement for market success is operating effectively in every global region. Solar is a domestic company competing and winning internationally through a marketing strategy of deploying processes within the culture of the region. By placing people in specific geographic areas and driving decisions down to their locale, Solar is able to operate effectively within the common practices of the region.

Customer Support
Another important requirement for market success is providing the necessary after-sales service and support in any global location. Because gas turbine installations operate for decades, service for the life of the product, overhaul, and refurbishment are critical components of market success.

Social Responsibility
All of Solar's facilities place high priority on environmental health and safety performance. High priority areas include Pollution Prevention and Waste Reduction and many of Solar's facilities have received awards for safety and environmental management.

Emission standards are becoming increasingly more stringent worldwide and are a core customer requirement. Offering low-emissions products provide a competitive advantage. Solar maintains a leadership position with its SoLoNOx™ dry-emission technology that significantly reduces nitrogen oxide emissions, a contributor to smog. Solar's effectiveness in providing new pollution-prevention technology into the marketplace was confirmed through a Department of Energy (DOE) grant to develop the next generation of high-efficiency, low-emission industrial gas turbines.

Supplier and Partnership Relationships
Suppliers are classified into three categories: approved, certified, and partners. Suppliers undergo a rigorous process to achieve these ratings, including an 18-point process-control assessment that addresses material and documentation control, personnel selection and training, quality management, and continuous improvement approach. Annual quality, cost, and cycle-time reduction goals are established and monitored and direct point-of-use deliveries provide both Solar and these suppliers with quality and cost benefits.

Supplier partnerships exist where there is a critical dependency on supplier technology, part performance, and/or part lead times. A few select partners have demonstrated the highest quality and performance standards, participated in shared risk-taking, and assigned people in Solar's facilities to participate on new product development teams.

Solar's supplier strategy is to optimize the number of suppliers by basing selection on core competencies, value added, and dedication to continuous improvement. Solar's Supplier Quality Management System (SQMS) provides suppliers with monthly status of their delivery and quality performance. Solar hosts Supplier Symposiums and training to strengthen relationships. Solar has special practices in place to manage and protect its small, disadvantaged suppliers.

HISTORY

Founded in 1927 as Prudden-San Diego Airplane Company, the firm built only three all-metal airplanes before the Great Depression hit in 1929. The company then began making components for other manufacturers.

Renamed Solar Aircraft Company in 1929 (reputedly because of San Diego's sunny climate), the young company struggled through the 1930s making a variety of products. It was then that Solar began pioneering with then-difficult techniques to fabricate high-temperature materials, such as stainless-steel for airplane engine exhaust manifolds.

Solar Aircraft was a vital defense company during World War II working around the clock to make more than 300,000 exhaust manifolds for U.S. airplanes. During the war, Solar was selected to help pioneer development of some of the critical high-temperature components for America's first aircraft gas turbines (jet engines). It was then that Solar began taking its first steps in a decades-long journey to become the world leader in industrial gas turbines and turbomachinery packages.

When peace was re-established in 1945, Solar Aircraft Company soon found itself again struggling, this time to survive the loss of its wartime production work. Its peoples' skills in metallurgy and fabricating difficult materials helped Solar land new contracts to produce aircraft/aerospace hardware ,such as jet engine afterburners and rocket components. Meanwhile, the workers also made stainless-steel caskets, frying pans, bulk milk containers and redwood furniture to help the company remain viable.

Late in the 1940s, Solar won a U.S. Navy contract to develop and manufacture small, 35-kW (45-hp) gas turbines to power portable pump units for fighting fires aboard ships. The company subsequently was awarded another Navy contract to build 300-kW (400-hp) gas turbine units to generate shipboard electrical power.

A fateful event occurred late in the 1950s when Solar earned yet another U.S. Navy contract - this one calling for development of a 750-kW(1000-hp) engine for high-speed boat propulsion. The result was the Saturn® gas turbine, which entered production in 1960. (That same year Solar Aircraft Company became a subsidiary of International Harvester Company and, three years later, became an IH division).

Solar's leaders realized that the Saturn turbine also had definite commercial potential because it was far smaller, lighter in weight, more reliable, and easier to maintain than the large, low-speed reciprocating engines that had been traditional for industrial applications. The Saturn engine went on to become the world's most widely used industrial gas turbine with some 4800 units in 80 countries. It remains in production today in two uprated and enhanced configurations.

Solar recognized that to win over customers from reciprocating equipment, the company would have to offer fully factory-assembled-and-tested turbomachinery packages, such as complete gas compressor sets, pump-drive packages and generator sets, rather than bare gas turbine engines. Solar began in 1960 to build its own line of centrifugal-flow natural-gas compressors, which now encompasses 18 models.

As Saturn turbine packages gained wider industrial acceptance, it became apparent that business opportunities existed for a more powerful gas turbine.

Work began in the mid-1960s on the Centaur®gas turbine, which entered service in 1968 at 2015 kW (2700 hp). Today's Centaur 40 gas turbine delivers 3520 kW (4700 hp).

After 46 years, Solar left the aircraft/aerospace industry in 1973 to concentrate its resources on industrial gas turbines, turbomachinery systems and support services. During its last decade of involvement with the aerospace/aircraft industry, Solar's work included production of mission-critical fuel lines, communications antennae, and nuclear generator thermal radiators for the Saturn/Apollo lunar landings, hot-section components for airline jet engines, and aerodynamic control devices for the famed F-4 Phantom jet fighter plane. Solar in 1977 introduced its then largest and most powerful engine, the 7900 kW (10,600-hp) Mars® gas turbine. Today Solar offers Mars engines in two output ranges, the 9860 kW (13,220-hp) Mars 90 and 11 190 (15,000-hp) Mars 100 gas turbines.

Caterpillar Tractor Co. (now Caterpillar Inc.) purchased the assets of Solar Turbines from International Harvester Company on May 31, 1981. Solar Turbines Incorporated is a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc., which is headquartered in Peoria, Illinois.

In 1985, Solar introduced a more powerful member of the Centaur engine family - the Centaur 50 now rated at 4570 kW (6130 hp). With some 3000 units in service, Centaur turbines rank second only to our Saturn turbines in total units installed worldwide. Our first Taurus™ 60 gas turbine left Solar's factory in 1990; its rating is 5740 kW (7700hp).

SoLoNOx Technology: By 1992, Solar had been developing combustion technology for nearly 20 years to reduce exhaust emissions when it introduced pollution-prevention SoLoNOx gas turbines. SoLoNOx engine technology is available for the Centaur, Mercury, Taurus, Mars and Titan™ gas turbines. Our advanced, dry, lean-premixed SoLoNOx combustion technology also can be retrofitted to many previously installed models of those turbines to allow owners to comply with newer, more stringent emissions regulations. Here again, Solar leads the industry with more than 2000 SoLoNOx engines shipped to customers in numerous countries.

The Taurus 70 gas turbine, introduced in 1993, is now rated at 7520 kW (10,310 hp). It was the first engine introduced into the gas turbine industry with pollution-prevention, lean-premixed combustion technology as a standard feature.

In more recent events, Solar Turbines announced in 1997 that it was developing the new simple-cycle Titan 130 gas turbine for industrial applications. The Titan 130 engine is available in a two-shaft, variable-speed version for mechanical-drive applications and in a single-shaft, constant-speed configuration for powering continuous-duty generator sets rated at 15 000 kWe. The Titan 130 gas turbine is designed to provide a simple-cycle thermal efficiency of greater than 34.5 percent.

Solar also began the field testing phase in 1997 of the world's first industrial gas turbine equipped with ceramic components in place of standard metal components, which require advanced cooling technologies to maintain metal temperatures at acceptable levels. Developed under a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program, the ceramic stationary gas turbine (CSGT) test engine is a single-shaft Centaur 50S industrial gas turbine installed at an oil company's cogeneration/steam-flooding site in California's San Joaquin Valley. The successful application of ceramic components would deliver several major benefits, including increased power by allowing operation at higher turbine inlet temperatures, higher thermal efficiency by reducing the need to use compressed air from the engine's compressor for component cooling, and lower exhaust emissions.

In a related program, Solar, in 1997, unveiled details of its 4.2-MWe optimized, recuperated-cycle Mercury™ 50 gas turbine generator system being developed in a cooperative effort with the U.S. DOE for the Advanced Turbine Systems program. The goals for the ATS industrial turbine program called for units that would be much more energy efficient and emit far fewer exhaust pollutants than 1991-era industrial gas turbines while also cutting the cost of producing electrical power by 10 percent.

Solar Turbines ranks as a world leader in industrial turbines up to 25,000 hp. The company has sold more than 13,800 gas turbine systems which are operating on land and offshore to provide rugged, reliable power for base-load electricity, cogeneration and standby power; producing, processing and transporting natural gas and oil; and marine propulsion.

Solar's gas turbines have logged approximately 1,000,000,000 hours of operating experience - equivalent to more than 100,000 years. And we're continuously working to improve our products and develop the advanced technologies, products and services that our customers will need to meet their future requirements.

Solar Turbines Mission Statement

We Will Provide The Best Value To Our Customers. 
We will be a leader in providing preferred solutions that maximize the use of pre-engineered industrial gas turbine products and systems that demonstrate quality and value to customers with power generation, compression, or pumping needs.

We Will Grow Profitably.
We will focus on an expanding range of turbomachinery products and services in growth-oriented markets and geographic areas to ensure our returns continuously exceed the corporate average.

Solar's Core Business Principles

Quality
Each of us is accountable for uncompromising quality and continuous improvement in all that we do and in everything we produce.

Employee Involvement 
We are each responsible for our own career development, as well as for the success and growth of our business. We accomplish this through teamwork and open communication and by aggressively contributing to continuous improvement.

Global Market Leadership
We earn commanding market leadership in our worldwide industry by anticipating and meeting or exceeding customer needs and expectations.

Global Product Support 
We support our customers with a full range of comprehensive, unrivalled products and services to ensure total customer satisfaction, volume, growth, and commanding global Customer Services leadership.

International Focus 
We maintain a strong worldwide presence, are sensitive to the diversities of our customers and employees, and operate our business from a multi-cultural perspective.

Product Development 
We maintain worldwide product leadership, maximize our Customer Services opportunities, and grow our business by aggressively improving and expanding our current core products and developing new ones.

Business Performance 
We seek excellent financial performance by balancing short-term performance with sustained long-term growth, investing wisely, and striving for flexible low costs to assure acceptable results in varying market cycles.

Social Responsibility 
We support and improve the communities where we live and work by providing a safe workplace, encouraging and supporting community involvement, improving the environment, and by respecting the value of every individual.