PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND FLAME STABILIZATION OF STAGNATION POINT REVERSE FLOW COMBUSTOR

R Manjunath, Patel Harinkumar Rajendrabhai, MD Zabeeulla Quadri, Sangishetty Sandeep Srinivas

Abstract: The conventional gas turbine engines use straight flow combustors. The reverse-flow layout effectively uses the air flow to cool down the combustor liner and the transition piece as a counter flow heat exchanging process. The absorbed heat by the air is returned back to the system. The reverse flow configuration causes the flow to stagnate and hot products to reverse and leave the combustor. One of the major challenges facing designers of low NOx emission combustion systems is flame stability, as the weaker combustion process is more vulnerable to small perturbations in combustor operating conditions. Since further reduction of NOx will likely require even leaner mixtures, schemes for lean stability extension must be considered. Stability can be dependent on the balance between flow and flame propagation velocities. In combustors where combustion is limited by reaction rates, however practical combustors do not operate in either limit. To stabilize a flame in the desired region of interest, various stabilization methodologies are adopted that either enhance the flame propagation speeds or create zones with low velocities where a flame can be sustained for inspection of premixed flame stability in Stagnation Point Reverse Flow combustor model, using Computational Fluid dynamics(CFD). The CFD analysis yielded the results which go with actual experimental results.

Keywords: combustor, stagnation, flame stability, reverse flow, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) etc..

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0402036