best tool for powerplant animation

[petek]

Yes, you can animate a turbine using Inventor. It's a very simple task to rotate a component, and not much more work to include a gear train to a generator.

I think 3DS would be the way to go to illustrate non-solid components (fluid flow, moving arrows, etc.). I'm not an expert in this, but I don't think you can import Inventor constraint-driven animation into 3DS - just the static models, which you could then animate in 3DS.