Thermoacoustic Stability Analysis of a Full-Annular Lean Combustor for Heavy-Duty Applications

Abstract

Thermoacoustic characterization of gas turbine combustion systems is of primary importance for successful development of gas turbine technology, to meet the stringent targets on pollutant emissions. In this context, it becomes more and more necessary to develop reliable tools to be used in the industrial design process. The dynamics of a lean-premixed full-annular combustor for heavy-duty applications has been numerically studied in this work. The well-established CFD-SI method has been used to investigate the flame response varying operational parameters such as the flame temperature (global equivalence ratio) and the fuel split between premixed and pilot fuel injections: such a wide range experimental characterization represents an opportunity to validate the employed numerical methods and to give a deeper insight into the flame dynamics. URANS simulations have been performed, due to their affordable computational costs from the industrial perspective, after validating their accuracy through the comparison against LES results. Furthermore, an approach where the pilot and the premixed flame responses are analyzed separately is proposed, exploiting the independence of their evolution. The calculated FTFs have been implemented in a 3D FEM model of the chamber, in order to perform linear stability analysis and to validate the numerical approach. A boundary condition for rotational periodicity based on Bloch-Wave theory has been implemented into the Helmholtz solver and validated against full-annular chamber simulations, allowing a significant reduction in computational time. The reliability of the numerical procedure has been assessed through the comparison against full-annular experimental results.