Compressorless Hydrogen Turbine Beats NASA Record

When it comes to energy production, we today have a vision of the future with solar panels on the ground, or maybe even in orbit, that turn sunlight into electricity, with eventually a battery park to store energy in the evening.

But in practice, electricity is still mostly produced by massive spinning turbines, powered by burning fossil fuels (gas, coal) or by the steam generated by the heat of nuclear reactions, or the flow of water in hydropower plants. While it might be obsolete one day, this type of installation is still the core of our energy systems.

A reason is that, in addition to being a well-understood technology, such turbines have the advantage of stabilizing the frequency of the power grid. This is because rotating turbines naturally produce alternating current, used for long-distance transmission, and the sheer mass of the turbine provides inertia to the grid frequency. In contrast, solar panels only produce DC power, with no capacity to stabilize the power grid.

This is becoming an increasingly important topic, as illustrated by the declining stability of the electric grid frequency, as the old large rotating generators are replaced by solar panels, a problem that was at the core of the 2025 massive crash of the Iberian (Spain + Portugal) power grid.

However, nuclear is still controversial and slow to deploy, while sites for hydropower plants are mostly tapped out in many countries. So if we want to have dependable, activable at any time turbines that also help the power grid, it seemed we were bound to still use natural gas for many decades.

This might not be true much longer, as researchers at the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have set a record runtime with a new compressorless turbine powered by hydrogen. As green hydrogen can be produced from renewable energy, this would open the path to a power grid powered by green hydrogen, especially in periods when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow enough to supply the grid.

They presented their findings at the Hannover Messe 2026.

How To Use Hydrogen

When it comes to having hydrogen become a central part of our energy systems, researchers have two different types of problems to solve.

The first one is to produce green hydrogen cheap enough that it is competitive with fossil fuels and other renewables + battery alternatives. This is a field making quick progress, as among different options can be to use cheaper catalysts like silicon carbide, cobalt, nickel, or a ruthenium, silicon, and tungsten alloy, or even coproduce green hydrogen and drinkable water.

Another question is how to turn the produced hydrogen back into energy. One way is fuel cells, which turn the hydrogen into electricity directly through an electrochemical reaction, like ones produced by Plug Power (PLUG ). This is a promising idea, but often requires expensive catalysts and complex cell design.

Another option, and in some way simpler, is simply to burn the hydrogen the way we burn natural gas. This can be done for vehicles in an internal combustion engine very similar to a gas power motor, a topic you can explore further in our article “5 Hydrogen Combustion Engines Set to Break the Mold”.

Now, for much larger combustion and large-scale electricity production, hydrogen turbines are also becoming a much more mature technology and a third option to utilize hydrogen.

The Next Generation of Turbines

 The Inefficiency of Traditional Turbines

The technology used by the researchers in this study could be especially useful for hydrogen turbines, but is not limited to this specific fuel either.

The key concept is that traditional gas turbines require about half of their output for air compression to operate. This means that they reach only a thermal efficiency of 35% to 40%, and 55%–64% if the exhaust heat is used to power a secondary steam turbine.

“A conventional gas turbine, such as those used in power plants or under aircraft wings, consumes about 50 percent of its power to compress air to the high pressure needed for efficient combustion — power that is then unavailable for electricity generation,”

Professor Daniel Banuti, Director of the Institute of Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES).

The reason why compression is required is that it is used to create the necessary high pressure to cause ignition of the fuel.

Detonations to Replace Compression

In this design, the researchers replaced compression with detonation waves inside the combustion chamber.

These waves arise from a fluid-mechanical instability creating patterns of waves and vortices in the flow of gas. By doing so, it entirely bypasses the need for energy-hungry mechanical compressors. This saves energy, reduces the number of moving parts, and increases efficiency.

Another advantage is that this method reduces the number of moving parts, which always contributes to simpler design and maintenance processes.

This design can be operated on fuels other than hydrogen, but hydrogen is especially suitable for detonation turbines: it reacts very quickly and can produce stable increases in pressure.

Complexity of Detonation Turbines

The difficulty with detonation turbines is in the name: instead of a normal combustion process, the gas injected into the turbine literally explodes. So keeping the turbine running without damaging it can be difficult.

In this experiment, the researchers managed to keep it running without causing damage for a record 303 seconds. While this might sound short, 5 full minutes of operation is much longer than the previous tests that lasted only fractions of a second. It is also longer than NASA’s previous record of 250 seconds, which also did not use hydrogen.

Another challenge is to turn the combustion/detonations into electricity, as the rapid and powerful reactions inside the chamber make it difficult to transfer energy to the turbine in a stable way. And without stable transfer, you cannot have stable rotation required for power generation.

“This is extremely difficult because the very fast and intense combustion processes in the chamber make stable energy transfer to the turbine challenging. We are the first to successfully operate such a turbine and generate electricity in the process.”

Professor Daniel Banuti, Director of the Institute of Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES).

Potential Applications

The key part of this prototype is that it demonstrated at once three experimental concepts:

• Running a detonation turbine successfully for several minutes.
• Using hydrogen to power it, demonstrating that hydrogen’s unique chemical profile is especially fit for this design.
• Coupling the detonations to electricity production, demonstrating the practical application of the prototype.

By utilizing hydrogen, this puts this design of detonation turbine in a class of its own, instead of comparing it to mature and economically proven gas-power turbines. This turns the potential weaknesses of detonation turbines, notably the need for high pressure and extreme reactivity of the fuel used, into a strength.

At the same time, it positions this technology as a future-proofed concept, as it is not a type of turbine that will become obsolete as fossil fuels are phased out.

In the long term, this could have application beyond electricity generation. In particular, aviation could be using similar turbines, as other fossil-fuel-powered detonation turbines are already being tested, notably Ram-Rotor Detonation Engines (RRDE), which could become the third generation of airplane propulsion, after turbojet and ramjet engines.

Investing in Power Turbines

GE Vernova

When it comes to turbines used for power generation, one company has been there since the first deployments of this technology, and is still a global leader today: General Electric.

Following the breakup of the giant industrial conglomerate into three separate companies, the part of the company that inherited the turbine and power generation technology is now called GE Vernova (GEV ).

Today, the company is still an expert in anything that spins, with 55,000 GE wind turbines and 7,000 GE gas turbines currently operating. Along with many hydro and nuclear power plants also equipped with GE turbines, they generate approximately 25% of the world’s total electricity.

Source: GE Vernova

This makes GE a reference for power turbines, not just with gas, but really any fuel or energy source to make them spin, including gas, steam, and water.

This is because the expertise of GE is not just in how to handle the fuel or the combustion, but also in materials science to make the turbine as resistant and efficient as possible while also cheaper and lightweight, with unique patents and virtual models forming a durable competitive moat.

As such, GE Vernova turbines are the primary choice for most of the world’s largest utility companies.

Source: GE Vernova

So the turn to hydrogen is to be expected, and the company is already growing in segments like hydrogen compressors and its own designs of hydrogen turbines with already 10 million operating hours recorded, demonstrating its skill at handling this often dangerous and difficult-to-utilize gas.

“As gas turbines are inherently fuel-flexible, they can be configured to operate on green hydrogen or similar fuels as a new unit, or be upgraded even after extended service on traditional fuels. GE Vernova’s broad field experience enables our engineers to understand the impact of using hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel.”

Investors in GE should focus in the short term on the existing wind and gas turbines, as well as hydro & nuclear turbines, which are the bulk of the company’s business in the next 10 years.

But the possibility of long-term upgrade of existing plant to hydrogen makes the business inherently resilient, alongside other technologies where GE Vernova is also spending a lot of R&D, like carbon capture, SMRs, High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC), energy storage, electric furnaces, industrial heat pumps, etc.

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