In a modern annular aircraft gas turbine combustor, the phenomenon of lean blow out (LBO) is of major concern. To understand the physical processes involved in LBO, a research combustor was designed and developed to specifically reproduce recirculation patterns and LBO processes that occur in a real gas turbine combustor.
A total of eight leading design criteria were established for the research combustor. This paper discusses the combustor design constraints, aerothermochemical design, choice of combustor configurations, combustor sizing, mechanical design, combustor light-off, and combustor acoustic considerations that went into the final design and fabrication. Tests on this combustor reveal a complex sequence of events such as flame lift-off, intermittency, and onset of axial flame instability leading to lean blowout. The combustor operates satisfactorily and is yielding benchmark quality data for validating and refining computer models for predicting LBO in real engine combustors.
A propane-fueled research combustor has been designed and developed to investigate lean blowouts in a simulated primary zone of the combustors for aircraft gas turbine engines. To better understand the flow development and to ensure that the special provisions in the combustor for optical access did not introduce undue influence, measurements of the velocity fields inside the combustor were made using laser Döppler anemometry. These measurements were made in isothermal, constant density flow to relate the combustor flow field development to known jet behavior and to backward-facing step experimental data in the literature. The major features of the flow field appear to be consistent with the expected behavior, and there is no evidence that the provision of optical access adversely affected the flows measured.
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