Westinghouse Advanced Energy Systems Division
Westinghouse Advanced Energy Systems Division (AESD) was a research and development facility for nonconventional renewable energy systems, in the paradoxically small town of Large in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania [USA]. The site is on the east side of Pa. Rte. 51, about 13 miles (21 km) south of Pittsburgh. Formally the site of the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory (WANL), Westinghouse Electric Corporation changed the name of the facility, along with its charter, in 1977.
Historical Note: The Large site is that of the former Large Distillery, founded by Jonathan Large (1794–1862), who came to the area as a child in 1797 after the Whiskey Rebellion. The distillery originally produced Monongahela rye whiskey, which was a local favorite. Management of the distillery later passed to Jonathan's son, Henry, who ensured the distillery's success by making "Large Monongahela Rye Whiskey" a national brand. Eventually, the Large Distillery was sold to The National Distillery Company, which retired the Large label but continued to market the whiskey as Old Overholt. The Large distillery eventually ceased operations and the property was sold to a developer who leased it to Westinghouse in the 1950s.
Diverse range of projects
Engineers at AESD designed and built prototype devices such as a heliostat, which was designed to concentrate sunlight (by means of a tracking, flat-mirror assembly) onto a fluid-filled tank mounted on a tower. This hot fluid could then be transferred to the ground and used to produce steam, spinning a turbine to generate electricity. [The Division's heliostat design resulted from a Department of Energy sponsored competition in the late 1970s for the best design for use in the proposed "Solar One" power tower project near Barstow, California. A prototype was built at the Large site and shipped to the Mojave Desert for testing, but another design ultimately was selected.]
Among AESD's successes was the winning site and conceptual design proposal for the Solar Total Energy Project (STEP) in Shenandoah [now part of Newnan], Coweta County, Georgia, 35 miles (56 km) south of Atlanta along I-85. Financed as a joint project by Georgia Power Company (part of Southern Company) and the U.S. Department of Energy, STEP operated from 1982 until 1989. Covering more than 5 acres (20,000 m2), it was the world's largest solar thermal cogeneration project. It consisted of 114 tracking parabolic-dish collectors (7 m dia), which heated a transfer fluid that produced high-pressure steam for generating electricity that was fed to an adjacent knitwear factory owned and operated by Bleyle of Germany. Downstream of the turbine, medium-pressure steam was piped to the plant for knitwear pressing, and low-pressure steam was used to provide air conditioning. The project was dismantled in 1989 when the turbine failed and there were no funds to replace it or provide other needed maintenance on the facility.
Other work conducted at AESD included testing of nickel metal hydride battery prototypes. A phosphoric acid fuel cell was designed, built, and tested successfully. Dendritic web silicon photocells were built and tested, and that business was later sold and transferred to Solar Power Industries Inc. of West Newton, Pa. AESD engineers also built a prototype for a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) system utilizing hot plasma gases emitted by a coal-fired power plant. The exhaust gasses passed through a copper plate channel, generating additional electricity [up to 30 percent].
Other Westinghouse site activities
Additional information on AESD and the other organizations within the now-defunct Advanced Power Systems Business Unit (APSBU) can be found in the article on the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory (WANL). These include the Advanced Reactors Division (ARD) and Advanced Coal Conversion Department (ACCD), both of which were at the Waltz Mill site in Madison, Pa., and the Fusion Power Systems Department (FPSD), co-located with AESD at the Large site. In 1983, ARD was merged into AESD, and the Waste Technology Services Division (WTSD) was created at the Large site to vie for contracts related to disposal of nuclear waste.
Post-Westinghouse site activities
With the decline of the nuclear power industry subsequent to the Three Mile Island accident and the Chernobyl disaster, Westinghouse abandoned the Large facility by the early 1990s, and space was leased to a range of commercial tenants. In 1994, a group of former employees at the site formed Pittsburgh Materials Technology Inc. (PMTI) to build upon the capabilities developed by Westinghouse, including advanced refractory metal alloys. In 2007, PMTI is still melting, processing and testing alloys such as niobium-base, tantalum-base, and vanadium-base compositions for a range of customers in both the aerospace and industrial sectors.