The increasingly stringent emissions standards in recent years have mandated low gas turbine emissions and thus changed the approach to combustion chamber design. In particular, lean burners based on highly premixed fuel-air flows have become more important. These combustors, termed Dry Low NOx (DLN), can now achieve emissions of 25 ppm and below in commercial operation.
This development together with the inlet turbine temperature increase has resulted in less cooling air for combustion chambers and turbine blade cooling systems. The designer now needs to optimise cooling air flows that control the wall temperature of the components that confine the hot gases. Moreover, much of the air coming from the compressor is used to premix the fuel and only a smaller fraction is now available for cooling processes. In annular combustor configurations the air available for cooling the combustion chamber walls sometimes also has to cool the first stage nozzle. So the pressure loss along the combustor cooling passages has to be limited in order to assure a suitable supply pressure for these downstream cooling passages.
We analysed the cooling air flow around the liner of an annular combustion chamber and we investigated the thermal flux and friction losses. In this paper we show the development of a calculation model that allows the critical components heat transfer analysis of a typical annular combustion chamber. The code developed is based on the generalised 1–D flow treatment. We have used experimental correlations for convection, film cooling and impingement borrowed from works found in literature. The code is provided with a graphical interface that helps the user during the calculation. This code was used in practical application to optimize the PGT5B combustion chamber cooling.
