Flashback Limit and Mechanism of Methane and Syngas Fuel

Abstract

Flashback is one of the major problems in lean premixed combustion of gas turbine combustor. Due to the effulgent future of co-product system and IGCC, lean premixed combustion, one of the approaches to ultra low NOx for rich hydrogen syngas fuel need farther research on anti-flashback and low pressure drop combustor. Mechanism and characteristics of methane and syngas flashback for 2 types of flame holders, i.e. ring shape and rod shape have been researched through experiment as well as numerical simulation. The partial premix model has been selected to simulate premixed combustion flashback process since it combined the advantage of PDF model and TFC model. Experiments demonstrate that, the flashback velocity of different fuel compositions or flame holder size generally can be correlated to the same dimensionless function by using Peclet number model if the structures of flame holders are the same. Peclet function curves were used to compare the anti-flashback performance of the 2 types of flame holders mentioned above with swirl holder. Boundary coaxial jet can change flashback through the wall into flashback in the core flow and significantly improve the anti-flashback performance of the ring-type flame holder on condition that the velocity of the boundary coaxial jet is in an optimal range. As the result, ring shape holder shows the best while swirl holder the worst on anti-flashback performance.