Session: 04-16 Combustor Design IV

Paper Number: 153868

Combustion Characterization of an Industrial Gas Turbine Combustor for Low Emissions Applications Fed With Natural Gas/Hydrogen Blends 

Recently, the use of lean-premixed combustion systems in gas turbines for power generation has led to a consistent emissions reduction. Nevertheless, swirl burners can be prone to flashbacks and to a non-negligible increase in emission levels when operated with blends of natural gas and hydrogen. In this scenario, the use of 3D-CFD analysis can contribute to the redesign of both the combustor and the injection system for the lifetime extension of existing power plants. In this work, a 5 MW annular combustor is investigated with a set of numerical simulations performed with the ANSYS® FLUENT® solver. This research follows an already performed study on the injection system for the same machine. An in-house routine developed in MATLAB® exploits the species profiles and velocity field obtained from the thorough characterization of the injector, thus allowing for a loosely-coupling of two systems. By adopting this procedure, the number of elements necessary to describe the combustor domain is reduced without any loss of information. The procedure is initially validated for the natural gas case by comparing numerical results with the performance tests performed by EthosEnergy Italia SpA. Then, the effects of hydrogen blending are analyzed in detail in terms of temperature distributions and emissions. The obtained results provide some retrofitting guidelines in the field of hydrogen usage for this type of machine.

Presenting Author: Salvatore Carusotto Politecnico di Torino

Presenting Author Biography: Salvatore graduated both B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. During his Master, he spent a semester at Politecnico di Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (Germany). Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in the Energy Department at Politecnico di Torino and this year he spent seven months as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Technical Acoustics - TU Berlin.

Authors:

Salvatore Carusotto Politecnico di Torino
Niccolò Capalbo Politecnico di Torino
Simone Salvadori Politecnico di Torino
Alberto Cavalli Ethos Energy Italia S.p.A.
Francesco Cardile Ethos Energy Italia S.p.A.
Daniela Anna Misul Politecnico di Torino