Study of Flow and Combustion in a generic Combustor fuelled with prevaporized Kerosene using LES and FGM

Abstract

Gas turbine combustion systems are characterized by flows that typically involve various interacting phenomena. These include turbulence, mixing, mass and heat transfer, radiation and multiphase flow. The flows exhibit large scale structures and evolve in a highly unsteady manner, which remains inaccessible to today’s RANS methods widely used in many 3D CFD industrial simulation tools. Large eddy simulations are proven to be reliable tool for the description of complex flow phenomenon. This paper presents an LES based combustion model which enables to evaluate the formation of pollutants precisely in a gas turbine combustion chamber. The chemical reaction source is modeled following the flamelet generated manifolds (FGM) method. In order to evaluate the capability of the model for predicting combustion processes induced by complex real fuels, a single sector combustor (SSC) fuelled with pre-vaporized kerosene at 0.4 MPa is numerically analysed. To appraise the quality of LES predictions, comparisons against available experimental measurement data will be provided along with an analysis of the reliability of the results obtained. Predictions of the flow field and some flame characteristics show satisfactory agreement with the experimental findings. This demonstrates the reliable predictability of the advanced LES model proposed.