The individual tubular low-toxic combustion chamber

Abstract

BACKGROUND: intensive works in improvement and development of microturbine power plants for energy and transport continues worldwide. These works are still relevant due to near-to-zero emissions of microturbines, as well as due to the fact that microturbines efficiency can be increased up to 50% and above, which opens the potential to compete with well-known power plants in the foreseeable future, including in terms of efficiency. Therefore, the work on the study of a low-toxic combustion chamber for a microturbine seems relevant as well. AIM: Сomputational and experimental study of an individual tubular low-toxic combustion chamber of a 50 kW microturbine with an increase in pressure at the inlet to the chamber. METHODS: The description of the experimental facility for combustion chamber testing and the results of its experimental study are given. A sufficient convergence of the experimentally obtained parameters of the combustion chamber with the parameters obtained from the simulation modeling of flow and combustion in the combustion chamber was obtained. RESULTS: In the course of the calculated and full-scale studies, hydraulic losses, nitrogen oxide emissions, and temperature unevenness at the outlet of the combustion chamber with increasing air pressure at its inlet were determined. CONCLUSIONS: The calculated study showed a significant effect of an increase in air pressure from 3 to 3.5 bar at the entrance to the combustion chamber on its main parameters. Thus, hydraulic losses have more than doubled and nitrogen oxide emissions have increased almost 1.3 times. The conducted experimental study of the combustion chamber generally confirmed the results of mathematical modeling and thereby tested the computational model used. Thus, the discrepancy in the experimentally and computationally obtained values of relative pressure losses in the combustion chamber does not exceed 15%, and in emissions of nitrogen oxides 7%.