The European Virtual Institute for Gas Turbine Instrumentation (EVI-GTI) 

arose through the European Union’s Competitive and Sustainable Growth (GROWTH) programme in 2002.

A definition of a ‘Virtual Institute’ can be found on the EU Cordis GROWTH web pages and is: “A network that links geographically dispersed complementary research and industrial capabilities with the potential to become a legal and self-supporting entity. The difference between Virtual Institutes and networks of other types is that a Virtual Institute needs to demonstrate the capability to become self-supporting”.

The idea behind EVI-GTI is to offer and maintain a platform for turbomachinery OEMs, vendors of sensors and instrumentation and academia. We organize and provide workshops and conferences and form multilateral or bilateral consortia.

EVI-GTI Conferences are organized bi-annual as as an International Conference held in Europe. Every two years, a Joint Transatlantic Conference together with the Propulsion Instrumentation Working Group (PIWG) was being held in the U.S. or in the EU.

Recent EU projects that have been generated, submitted and successfully completed within EVI-GTI are HEATTOP and STARGATE.

Together with PIWG, we have developed and continuously updated the Lap Gap Matrix which sorts technologies for sensors, probes and instrumentation into several categories and shows which technologies are currently developed satisfactory (green), or which are not available but can be worked around (yellow), or which are still not available today and thus prevent further development of gas turbine engines to higher efficiency (red).

The current EVI-GTI Board of Directors was elected in our online General Assembly on 10 Dec 2021 and has been reconfirmed on 27 March 2025 in the EVI-GTI General Assembly at the Joint ETC16 / 11th Int EVI-GTO Conference in Hannover, Germany. The Board is represented by:  

EVI-GTI Board of Directors

		Name		Position
		Dr. Ralf Obertacke Siemens Energy, Germany		President of EVI-GTI since 2017. Co-Founder, former Vice President and Industrial Advisor of EVI-GTI. Invited Committee Member of Euroturbo. Guest Editor for Special Editions of the IJTPP.
		Peter Loftus EThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Ltd. United Kingdom		Vice-President, Advisor. Co-Founder and Former President of EVI-GTI 2011-2017. Guest Editor for Special Editions of the IJTPP.  Retired from Rolly-Royce.
		Michael Henke University of Hannover, Germany		General Secretary of EVI-GTI. Local Organizer of the ETC16 / 11th Int. EVI-GTI Conf.  in Hannover.
		Dr. Björn Karlsson Siemens Energy, Sweden		EVI-GTI Conference Program Chairman. Guest Editor for Special Editions of the IJTPP.
		Dr. Hanspeter Zinn GE Gas Power, Switzerland		EVI-GTI Review Chairman. Former Scientific Advisor. Guest Editor for Special Editions of the IJTPP.
		James P. Roberts Rolls-Royce Plc. United Kingdom		EVI-GTI Board Member for R&D. Main Driver of the PIWG / EVI-GTI 'Lab Gap Matrix'. Retired from Rolly-Royce.
		Dr. Andreas Zeisberger MTU Aero Engines Germany		EVI-GTI Board Member
		Co-Chairs
		Harvey Niska Instrumentation Technology Consulting (ITC), Gilbert, Arizona USA		15 years as Co Chairman - Propulsion Instrumentation Working Group (PIWG)
		Thomas Serbowicz Williams International, USA		PIWG (Co-chair)