59040 - A Practical Method for Burner Staging Turbine Forced Response Evaluation 

Decarbonization and sustainability efforts challenge gas turbine engineers to come up with creative strategies for reduction of emissions and efficiency increase over the whole operating range. Burner staging at part loads presents a flexible solution to achieve these goals through selective burner deactivation. Shutting off burners could also be required for combustion of increased H2 content at some conditions. Burner staging will create circumferential unevenness with patterns of hot and cold streaks that could excite blade rows through the entire turbine. This paper presents a parametric method for annular combustor staging patterns profile generation intended for use for forced response predictions from a limited number of combustor CFD calculations while keeping the key phenomenological features. Two cases with burner staging turbine inlet temperature distributions are considered and compared to a base case with uniform temperature distribution. The unsteady aerodynamic forcing was obtained from full wheel time marching unsteady computational fluid dynamics calculations. The results show that the hot streaks generate important and noticeable excitation sources. Additionally, the results show that the pattern generator could be used extensively before and after the unsteady calculations phase in order to minimize the excitation levels and the computational load. Lastly the results from one of the generated profiles were compared to the same profile produced through combustor CFD calculations.