Validation of Hydrogen Boundary Layer Flashback Model on Gas Turbine Geometries and Conditions

Hydrogen is considered as a promising zero carbon battery fuel to deliver balancing power for the future electricity system with an increasing share of variable renewable power generation. Flame flashback is one of the main challenges for the application of hydrogen in gas turbines. Lean premixed hydrogen combustion is more prone to flashback than natural gas combustion due to higher flame speed and Lewis number effect. The TU Delft developed a boundary layer flashback model based on a previous work by TU Munich. The TU Delft model includes amongst others the effect of the laminar flame speed, boundary layer profile, Lewis number and adverse pressure gradient of the mean flow. The model was successfully validated on academic experiments from TU Munich. In the present paper the turbulent flame speed closure in the TU Delft flashback model is updated for gas turbine like conditions using experimental data from the University of California, Irvine (UCI). This updated model is validated against data from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and back tested on the original academic experiments from TU Munich. The updated TU Delft boundary layer flashback model and the flashback model from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have been applied to a scaled version of the Flamesheet™ combustor. The outcome of the PSI flashback model correlates very well with test results from the TU Delft laboratory, the TU Delft flashback model only with the original flame speed correlation.