Energy, Sustainability & the Environment - History

Described as one of the greatest engineers that this country has ever produced, Charles Parsons attended lectures in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge in the late nineteenth century. Some of his achievements in the field of power generation using steam turbines are documented in our 125th anniversary site.

Nowadays, advanced gas turbine and combined cycle power stations can generate electricity with the highest efficiency, the lowest running cost and most importantly the lowest chemical emissions of any current fossil-fuel system. A group of researchers within the Department of Engineering are now combining skills in acoustics, computational fluid dynamics and control to develop theories to explain and predict the occurrence of instability in these systems, so that safe and reliable gas turbines can be designed.

Much of the research into turbomachinery is now carried out at The Whittle Laboratory, named after Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, who studied at Cambridge in the 1930s.