The Effect of Cooling Air on the Air Fuel Distribution of a Silo Combustor

Abstract

Lean blow out (LBO) has a big impact on emission formation at part load of gas turbines, where flame temperature is low and flame stabilization is an issue. With improved combustion behavior at LBO conditions the operation flexibility of a silo gas turbine can be increased within the scope of retrofitting. In multi burner arrangements a part of the preheated air designated for combustion is used for impingement cooling of the burner front panel and subsequently injected into the primary combustion zone. In this region of flame stabilization air and unburned fuel as well as burned products are mixed to sustain stable combustion. The object of this study is to determine the level of dilution of the flow field by the cooling air with the focus on the conditions below LBO that can impair flame stability. The question addressed in this paper is how mixing of the front panel cooling air with the incoming reactants and the combustion products in multi burner arrangements can be computed in a numerically efficient way. As test case for the methodology the local distribution of cooling air in a silo combustor is presented. In this numerical study mixing processes of air-fuel mixture and cooling air as well as aerodynamic interaction of adjacent burners in a multi burner systems are investigated using isothermal Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations. Former published single burner water channel experiments and Large Eddy Simulations (LES) [1] serve as a baseline. Single burner RANS simulations are done and compared to measurement and LES to validate the velocity and scalar fields. A Schmidt number variation is used to modify the mixing process in the RANS single burner calculations. Based on the LES the single burner is modified to address the multi burner conditions and calculated with LES and RANS. Finally the multi burner system is computed with the settings applied in the single burner configuration. Using the symmetry of the investigated burner matrix an efficient methodology is implemented that allows computation of one sixth of a silo combustor. The results expose a strong burner-burner interaction of the recirculation zones and in contrast to the single burner configuration regions of concentrated cooling air.