Powering the hydrogen future: how Siemens Energy unified design, simulation, and manufacturing

Siemens Energy is a global leader in power generation and the energy transition, focused on enabling a more sustainable, low-carbon future. The company delivers innovative technologies and services across the energy and utilities sector, supporting power producers, industrial organizations, and infrastructure providers in improving efficiency, reliability, and decarbonization outcomes. With operations spanning multiple continents, Siemens Energy plays a critical role in advancing next-generation energy systems worldwide.

As Siemens Energy set out to transition its gas turbine fleet to operate on up to 100% hydrogen, it faced significant technical challenges, ranging from extreme thermal loads to fundamentally different combustion behaviors compared to natural gas. Addressing this level of complexity required not only advanced manufacturing techniques like additive manufacturing, but also a fully connected digital engineering ecosystem. To achieve this, Siemens Energy leveraged the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, including NX CAD, NX CAM, Simcenter STAR-CCM+, and Teamcenter for product lifecycle management. Together, these solutions established an integrated digital thread that unified design, simulation, and production into a single, cohesive workflow.

Additive Manufacturing as a catalyst for innovation

Siemens additive manufacturing (AM) software played a key role in enabling Siemens Energy to overcome the challenges of hydrogen combustion. Additive manufacturing empowered Siemens Energy engineers to create highly complex burner geometries, such as embedded cooling channels, that manage extreme thermal loads and improve performance.

Siemens additive manufacturing software enabled rapid iteration from design to production, eliminating intermediate steps and accelerating development. This approach not only increased design flexibility but also reduced material waste and improved efficiency, helping bring hydrogen-ready gas turbine technology to life.

Additive manufacturing of the burner design enables us to create geometries we couldn‘t produce conventionally,” says Sebastian Piegert, head of technology for additive manufacturing at Siemens Energy. “As a digital manufacturing technology, additive manufacturing has its advantages in design flexibility and freedom.“

Connecting the digital thread end-to-end

With previous projects, Siemens Energy‘s engineering teams relied on disconnected software tools that did not integrate well. This fragmented approach created bottlenecks in design-to-manufacturing workflows requiring multiple software conversions. There were also collaboration challenges among global teams working on complex iterations, version control and data consistency across distributed engineering centers. These issues were magnified by the rapid iteration cycles necessary for hydrogen burner optimization. To address this issue, Siemens Energy adopted solutions from the Siemens Xcelerator.

This transformation eliminated fragmented workflows and reduced software interfaces from three systems to one, removing the need for file conversions and minimizing errors. More importantly, it enabled real-time collaboration across globally distributed engineering teams, ensured version consistency, and allowed rapid iteration cycles critical for optimizing hydrogen combustion systems. Engineers could simulate fluid dynamics and thermal performance, refine designs instantly, and directly generate manufacturing instructions, all within the same environment.

By adopting an integrated digital approach, Siemens Energy significantly accelerated innovation while maintaining performance and quality:

• Completed approximately 1,000 simulation-driven design iterations before manufacturing
• Developed 26 burner design variants, more than four times previous capabilities
• Reduced development bottlenecks, rework, and data inconsistencies
• Enabled seamless global collaboration and faster decision-making
• Delivered a fully green hydrogen-capable gas turbine
• Achieved potential CO₂ emissions reductions of up to 65,000 tons annually

The Siemens Xcelerator integrated digital thread enables us to seamlessly connect design, optimization and manufacturing, thereby reducing all software interfaces to just a single one. We must develop increasingly more complex products in ever shorter periods of time. We can only achieve this with the help of digital threads.” explains Piegert.

Siemens Energy redefined how complex energy systems are developed. This approach not only accelerated time-to-market and improved engineering efficiency, but also enabled breakthrough innovation, positioning the company at the forefront of hydrogen-based power generation and the broader energy transition.