Wood Group Engineering Services (Middle East) Ltd (WGES), part of the Gas Turbine Services business of John Wood Group PLC (“Wood Group”), has extended the industrial gas turbine testing capability of its Dubai test facility to include performance testing of Solar Centaur® 40 engines. This adds to the company’s existing Solar Mars® testing capability.

Two Centaur® 40 testing berths have been installed at the Dubai facility, one for cold end drive single shaft units and the other for hot end drive twin shaft units. The berths are designed to test the T4000 to T4700 models of the Centaur® 40 gas turbine, and WGES has already successfully tested seven Centaur® 40 engines.

Steve Hawley, General Manager of WGES, said: “This extension of our test capabilities makes us the only service provider with facilities located in the Middle East capable of performance testing Centaur® 40 engines. Together with our gas turbine repair and overhaul facility, also in Dubai, we can now offer a comprehensive repair, overhaul and test package to our Solar Centaur® 40 customers throughout the Eastern Hemisphere.”

WGES’s test facility was opened in early 2002 to provide performance testing of Solar Mars® 90 and 100 gas turbines to the Middle East and wider Eastern Hemisphere regions. The facility is operated by a PLC (programmable logic control) control system, housed in an acoustically protected room, which enables the collection and display of live performance data on touch screen monitors. This data is fed into a test programme and recorded at designated load levels, resulting in printed reports for the customer.