Spray Flame Characteristics of Bio-Derived Fuels in a Simulated Gas Turbine Burner

Author(s):  
Heena Panchasara ◽  
Pankaj S. Kolhe ◽  
Ajay K. Agrawal

Abstract Fuel injection plays an important role in liquid fueled gas turbine combustion. The strong interdependence of liquid breakup and atomization, turbulent dispersion of these droplets, droplet evaporation, and fuel-air mixing make the spray modeling an extremely challenging task. The physical processes are even more difficult to predict for alternative fuels with different thermophysical properties. In this study, spray flames of unheated and preheated vegetable oil (VO) produced by an air-blast atomizer in a swirl stabilized combustor are investigated experimentally. Phase Doppler particle analyzer (PDPA) is used to measure the instantaneous diameter and axial velocity of droplets at different axial and radial locations in both flames. Experiments are conducted at an equivalence ratio of 0.79 and atomizing air to liquid ratio (ALR) by mass of 2.5 to obtain stable VO flames. Radial profiles of mean axial velocity and Sauter mean diameter are presented to show the effect of fuel preheating. Joint Probability Density Functions (joint PDF) are presented to show the correlation between droplet diameter and axial velocity. Results are analyzed to show that both sprays exhibit self-similar droplet diameter distributions at different axial and radial locations when normalized properly. Thus, the vast amount of PDPA data in the spray can be reduced to simple distribution functions. A method to reconstruct the joint PDF from experimentally determined distribution functions is presented. We envision that the joint PDF approach outlined in this study could be implemented in high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic models to improve spray predictions in future studies.

2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heena Panchasara ◽  
Pankaj S. Kolhe ◽  
Ajay K. Agrawal

Abstract Fuel injection plays an important role in liquid-fueled gas turbine combustion. The strong interdependence of liquid breakup and atomization, turbulent dispersion of these droplets, droplet evaporation, and fuel–air mixing make the spray modeling an extremely challenging task. The physical processes are even more difficult to predict for alternative fuels with different thermophysical properties. In this study, spray flames of unheated and preheated vegetable oil (VO) produced by an air-blast (AB) atomizer in a swirl stabilized combustor are investigated experimentally. Phase Doppler particle analyzer (PDPA) is used to measure the instantaneous diameter and axial velocity of droplets at different axial and radial locations in both flames. Experiments are conducted at an equivalence ratio of 0.79 and atomizing air to liquid ratio by a mass of 2.5 to obtain stable VO flames. Radial profiles of mean axial velocity and Sauter mean diameter (SMD) are presented to show the effect of fuel preheating. Joint probability density functions (joint PDF) are presented to show the correlation between droplet diameter and axial velocity. Results are analyzed to show that both sprays exhibit self-similar droplet diameter distributions at different axial and radial locations when normalized properly. Thus, the vast amount of PDPA data in the spray can be reduced to simple distribution functions. A method to reconstruct the joint PDF from experimentally determined distribution functions is presented. We envision that the joint PDF approach outlined in this study could be implemented in high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic models to improve spray predictions in future studies.


Author(s):  
Zachary Harris ◽  
Joshua Bittle ◽  
Ajay Agrawal

Abstract Advanced engine design and alternative fuels present the possibility of fuel injection at purely supercritical conditions in diesel engines and gas turbines. The complex interactions that govern this phenomenon still need significant research for reliable modeling efforts. Boundary conditions for fuel injection are critical to accurate simulation. However, the flow inside the injector itself is often omitted to reduce the computational efforts, and thus, velocity, mass flux, or total pressure is specified at the injector exit (or domain inlet), often with an assumed top hat profile and assumed turbulence levels. Past studies have shown that such simplified inlet boundary treatment has minimal effects on the results for fuel injection in the compressed liquid phase. However, the validity of this approach at supercritical fuel injection conditions has not been assessed so far. In this study, comprehensive real-gas and binary fluid mixing models have been implemented for computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis of fuel-air mixing at supercritical conditions. The model is verified using prior CFD results from the literature. Next, the model is used to investigate the effects of the shape of axial velocity and mass fraction profiles at the inlet boundary with the goal to improve the comparison of predictions to experimental data. Results show that the boundary conditions have a significant effect on the predictions, and none of the cases match precisely with experimental data. The study reveals that the physical location of the inlet boundary might be difficult to infer correctly from the experiments and highlights the need for high-quality, repeatable measurements at supercritical conditions to support the development of relevant high-fidelity models for fuel-air mixing.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Zachary Harris ◽  
Joshua Bittle ◽  
Ajay Agrawal

Abstract Advanced engine design and alternative fuels present the possibility of fuel injection at purely supercritical conditions in diesel engines and gas turbines. The complex interactions that govern this phenomenon still need significant research, particularly the boundary conditions for fuel injection are critical for accurate simulation. However, the flow inside the injector itself is often omitted to reduce the computational efforts, and thus, velocity, mass flux, or total pressure is specified at the injector exit (or domain inlet), often with simplified velocity profiles and turbulence levels. This simplified inlet boundary treatment has minimal effects on results for conventional fuel injection conditions, however, the validity of this approach at supercritical conditions has not been assessed. Comprehensive real-gas and binary fluid mixing models have been implemented for computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis of fuel-air mixing at supercritical conditions. The model is verified using prior CFD results from the literature. The model is used to investigate the effects of the shape of axial velocity and mass fraction profiles at the inlet boundary with the goal to improve the comparison of predictions to experimental data. Results show that the boundary conditions have a significant effect on the predictions, and none of the cases match precisely with experimental data. The study reveals that the physical location of the inlet boundary might be difficult to infer correctly from the experiments and highlights the need for high-quality, repeatable measurements at supercritical conditions to support the development of relevant high-fidelity models for fuel-air mixing.


Author(s):  
J. E. Peters

This paper is a review of current research and development work in gas turbine combustion and fuels based on publications in the open literature and papers and reports supplied to the author by various gas turbine manufacturers on their current combustor research and development programs. Both aircraft and industrial applications are considered for the two major topics that are covered in the paper, alternative fuels and computer modeling, and for the illustration of two combustor component research and development activities. For aircraft applications, alternative fuel studies have centered on “heavier” fuels and have shown physical properties of the fuels which influence atomization and vaporization to be of primary concern regarding ignition and flame stability while chemical properties are more important to particulate emissions, heat transfer and liner durability considerations. For industrial applications, the use of medium to low heating value fuels and coal slurries have received much attention with particular emphasis on fuel delivery and mixing modifications within the combustor to accommodate these fuels. Computer modeling continues to play an increasingly important role in combustor development; currently the so-called “TEACH” based codes and their offspring are used for the majority of the computational fluid dynamics applications for gas turbine combustors. However, much work is being directed towards advanced differencing schemes, complex boundary fitting programs and proper treatment of inlet and boundary conditions in addition to studies devoted to advancing the physical submodels that are incorporated in the codes. Finally, two examples of research and development for specific design considerations are illustrated with a discussion of recent efforts on staged combustion for NOx control and on fuel injection.


2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Karlström ◽  
Karin Eriksson

Abstract This is the first in a series of papers presenting the development of a comprehensive multiscale model with focus on fiber energy efficiency in thermo mechanical pulp processes. The fiber energy efficiency is related to the defibration and fibrillation work obtained when fibers and fiber bundles interact with the refining bars. The fiber energy efficiency differs from the total refining energy efficiency which includes the thermodynamical work as well. Extracting defibration and fibrillation work along the radius in the refining zone gives information valuable for fiber development studies.Models for this process must handle physical variables as well as machine specific parameters at different scales. To span the material and energy balances, spatial measurements from the refining zone must be available. In this paper, measurements of temperature profile and plate gaps from a full-scale CD-refiner are considered as model inputs together with a number of process variables. This enables the distributed consistency in the refining zone as well as the split of the total work between the flat zone and the CD-zone to be derived. As the temperature profile and the plate gap are available in the flat zone and the CD-zone at different process conditions it is also shown that the distributed pulp dynamic viscosity can be obtained. This is normally unknown in refining processes but certainly useful for all fluid dynamic models describing the bar-to-fiber interactions. Finally, it is shown that the inclusion of the machine parameters will be vital to get good estimates of the refining conditions and especially the split between the thermodynamical work and the defibration/fibrillation work.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073490412199344
Author(s):  
Wolfram Jahn ◽  
Frane Sazunic ◽  
Carlos Sing-Long

Synthesising data from fire scenarios using fire simulations requires iterative running of these simulations. For real-time synthesising, faster-than-real-time simulations are thus necessary. In this article, different model types are assessed according to their complexity to determine the trade-off between the accuracy of the output and the required computing time. A threshold grid size for real-time computational fluid dynamic simulations is identified, and the implications of simplifying existing field fire models by turning off sub-models are assessed. In addition, a temperature correction for two zone models based on the conservation of energy of the hot layer is introduced, to account for spatial variations of temperature in the near field of the fire. The main conclusions are that real-time fire simulations with spatial resolution are possible and that it is not necessary to solve all fine-scale physics to reproduce temperature measurements accurately. There remains, however, a gap in performance between computational fluid dynamic models and zone models that must be explored to achieve faster-than-real-time fire simulations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 1327-1346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdelghani Bellouquid ◽  
Juan Calvo ◽  
Juan Nieto ◽  
Juan Soler

Author(s):  
M. Bianchi ◽  
F. Melino ◽  
A. Peretto ◽  
P. R. Spina ◽  
S. Ingistov

In the last years, among all different gas turbine inlet air cooling techniques, an increasing attention to fogging approach is dedicated. The various fogging strategies seem to be a good solution to improve gas turbine or combined cycle produced power with low initial investment cost and less installation downtime. In particular, overspray fogging and interstage injection involve two-phase flow consideration and water evaporation during compression process (also known as wet compression). According to the Author’s knowledge, the field of wet compression is not completely studied and understood. In the present paper, all the principal aspects of wet compression and in particular the influence of injected water droplet diameter and surface temperature, and their effect on gas turbine performance and on the behavior of the axial compressor (change in axial compressor performance map due to the water injection, redistribution of stage load, etc.) are analyzed by using a calculation code, named IN.FO.G.T.E. (INterstage FOgging Gas Turbine Evaluation), developed and validated by the Authors.


1997 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. K. Rizk ◽  
J. S. Chin ◽  
M. K. Razdan

Satisfactory performance of the gas turbine combustor relies on the careful design of various components, particularly the fuel injector. It is, therefore, essential to establish a fundamental basis for fuel injection modeling that involves various atomization processes. A two-dimensional fuel injection model has been formulated to simulate the airflow within and downstream of the atomizer and address the formation and breakup of the liquid sheet formed at the atomizer exit. The sheet breakup under the effects of airblast, fuel pressure, or the combined atomization mode of the airassist type is considered in the calculation. The model accounts for secondary breakup of drops and the stochastic Lagrangian treatment of spray. The calculation of spray evaporation addresses both droplet heat-up and steady-state mechanisms, and fuel vapor concentration is based on the partial pressure concept. An enhanced evaporation model has been developed that accounts for multicomponent, finite mass diffusivity and conductivity effects, and addresses near-critical evaporation. The presents investigation involved predictions of flow and spray characteristics of two distinctively different fuel atomizers under both nonreacting and reacting conditions. The predictions of the continuous phase velocity components and the spray mean drop sizes agree well with the detailed measurements obtained for the two atomizers, which indicates the model accounts for key aspects of atomization. The model also provides insight into ligament formation and breakup at the atomizer exit and the initial drop sizes formed in the atomizer near field region where measurements are difficult to obtain. The calculations of the reacting spray show the fuel-rich region occupied most of the spray volume with two-peak radial gas temperature profiles. The results also provided local concentrations of unburned hydrocarbon (UHC) and carbon monoxide (CO) in atomizer flowfield, information that could support the effort to reduce emission levels of gas turbine combustors.


Author(s):  
Bernhard Ćosić ◽  
Frank Reiss ◽  
Marc Blümer ◽  
Christian Frekers ◽  
Franklin Genin ◽  
...  

Abstract Industrial gas turbines like the MGT6000 are often operated as power supply or as mechanical drives. In these applications, liquid fuels like 'Diesel Fuel No.2' can be used either as main fuel or as backup fuel if natural gas is not reliably available. The MAN Gas Turbines (MGT) operate with the Advanced Can Combustion (ACC) system, which is capable of ultra-low NOx emissions for gaseous fuels. This system has been further developed to provide dry dual fuel capability. In the present paper, we describe the design and detailed experimental validation process of the liquid fuel injection, and its integration into the gas turbine package. A central lance with an integrated two-stage nozzle is employed as a liquid pilot stage, enabling ignition and start-up of the engine on liquid fuel only. The pilot stage is continuously operated, whereas the bulk of the liquid fuel is injected through the premixed combustor stage. The premixed stage comprises a set of four decentralized nozzles based on fluidic oscillator atomizers, wherein atomization of the liquid fuel is achieved through self-induced oscillations. We present results illustrating the spray, hydrodynamic, and emission performance of the injectors. Extensive testing of the burner at atmospheric and full load high-pressure conditions has been performed, before verification within full engine tests. We show the design of the fuel supply and distribution system. Finally, we discuss the integration of the dual fuel system into the standard gas turbine package of the MGT6000.


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