Design of a Nonreacting Combustor Simulator With Swirl and Temperature Distortion With Experimental Validation

Abstract

Nonuniform combustor outlet flows have been demonstrated to have significant impact on the first and second stage turbine aerothermal performance. Rich-burn combustors, which generally have pronounced temperature profiles and weak swirl profiles, primarily affect the heat load in the vane but both the heat load and aerodynamics of the rotor. Lean burn combustors, in contrast, generally have a strong swirl profile which has an additional significant impact on the vane aerodynamics which should be accounted for in the design process. There has been a move towards lean burn combustor designs to reduce NOx emissions. There is also increasing interest in fully integrated design proc esses which consider the impact of the combustor flow on the design of the high pressure vane and rotor aerodynamics and cooling. There are a number of current large research projects in scaled (low temperature and pressure) turbine facilities which aim to provide validation data and physical understanding to support this design philosophy. There is a small body of literature devoted to rich burn combustor simulator design but no open lit erature on the topic of lean burn simulator design. The particular problem is that in non reacting, highly swirling and diffusing flows, vortex instability in the form of a precessing vortex core or vortex breakdown is unlikely to be well matched to the reacting case. In reacting combustors the flow is stabilized by heat release, but in low temperature simula tors other methods for stabilizing the flow must be employed. Unsteady Reynoldsaveraged Navier-Stokes and large eddy simulation have shown promise in modeling swirling flows with unstable features. These design issues form the subject of this paper.

Effect of a Combined Hot-Streak and Swirl Profile on Cooled 1.5-Stage Turbine Aerodynamics: An Experimental and Computational Study

“…The design of the simulator is described in Refs. [32,33]. The integration and commissioning of the combustor simulator in the OTRF was described by Adams et al [34].…”

Commissioning of a Combined Hot-Streak and Swirl Profile Generator in a Transonic Turbine Test Facility

“…Hall et al [18] reported the first design of a fully annular leanburn combustor simulator. This simulator, which is the focus of this study, was designed for use in the OTRF using an unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach.…”

“…This paper reports the commissioning in the OTRF of the leanburn combustor simulator developed by Hall et al [18]. The simulator has been modified with respect to the configuration described in Ref.…”

Study of Flow Field Inside a Can Combustor for Micro Gas Turbine Engine Under Nonreacting Flow Conditions

“…In the study by Crocker et al (1999) on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of gas turbine combustor from compressor exit to turbine inlet, the detailed flow analysis was carried out for liner and wall temperature predictions. Hall et al (2014) Most of the previous studies are on a large-scale combustor employed in high power gas turbines. However, the large-scale combustors cannot be scaled down as it is due to unscalable parameters, such as characteristic combustion time (Van den Braembussche 2005).…”