Heavy duty gas turbines are the core components in the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) system. Different from the conventional fuel for gas turbine such as natural gas and light diesel, the combustible component acquired from the IGCC system is hydrogen-rich syngas fuel. It is important to modify the original gas turbine combustor or redesign a new combustor for syngas application since the fuel properties are featured with the wide range hydrogen and carbon monoxide mixture. First, one heavy duty gas turbine combustor which adopts natural gas and light diesel was selected as the original type. The redesign work mainly focused on the combustor head and nozzle arrangements. This paper investigated two feasible combustor arrangements for the syngas utilization including single nozzle and multiple nozzles. Numerical simulations are conducted to compare the flow field, temperature field, composition distributions, and overall performance of the two schemes. The obtained results show that the flow structure of the multiple nozzles scheme is better and the temperature distribution inside the combustor is more uniform, and the total pressure recovery is higher than the single nozzle scheme. Through the full scale test rig verification, the combustor redesign with multiple nozzles scheme is acceptable under middle and high pressure combustion test conditions. Besides, the numerical computations generally match with the experimental results.
