Session: 11-01: Combustor Heat Transfer

Paper Number: 151901

Numerical Analysis of Radiative Heat Transfer Within a Rich-Burn, Quick-Mix, Lean-Burn Combustor 

Heat transfer to the wall is a significant contributor to gas turbine engine efficiency and durability. However, understanding of the magnitude and characteristics of radiative heat transfer is still lacking, due to challenges in measuring and modeling radiation in complex combustors. As a first step towards understanding radiative heat transfer and its relative significance compared to convective heat transfer in a realistic gas turbine combustor, we conduct a frozen-field analysis of a snapshot from the numerical solutions of a Pratt & Whitney’s combustor. The numerical solutions were obtained through large eddy simulations with the flame generated manifold model. Soot volume fraction is postprocessed through an empirical relation. A Monte Carlo ray tracing radiation solver is employed in the frozen-field analysis, where the composition and temperature fields are fixed in space and time. The line-by-line spectral database is employed to account for the non-gray effects of radiation. Radiative heat fluxes on the inner and outer diameter walls and the turbine-combustor interface are collected. Contribution from CO₂, H₂O, and soot to incident radiative flux on the walls are analyzed. It is found that soot is a major contributor to the incident heat flux to the wall, while CO₂ dominates the re-absorption process within the combustor. Significant amount of radiation is crossing the turbine-combustor interface, which can add additional heat loads to the turbine vanes. Lastly, the magnitude of radiative heat flux can be comparable to that of the convective fluxes, indicating the potential significance to consider radiation in future engine designs. 

 

Presenting Author: Xinyu Zhao University of Connecticut

Presenting Author Biography: Prof. Xinyu Zhao is the Centennial term associate professor at University of Connecticut. She joined the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Manufacturing in Spring 2015 as an assistant professor, and prior to that, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center at Princeton (2014), co-sponsored by Sandia National Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph. D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University (2013), and she received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Thermal Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Prof. Zhao’s research program is supported by NSF CISE, the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, NASA, NSF C-BET, AFOSR, and ONR. She has also been actively working with industrial partners such as FM Global, Pratt&Whitney and Raytheon Technologies Research Center. Prof. Zhao is the recipient of the AFOSR YIP award, NSF CAREER award, and Combustion institute’s Irvin Glassman Young Investigator award. Her research interest includes detailed radiation modeling for multiphase combustion systems, turbulent combustion modelling, detonation, the interplay between experiments and computation, as well as high-performance computing.

Authors:

Nicolas Tricard Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andressa Johnson Pratt & Whitney
Nicolas Meister University of Connecticut
Alex Hemchand University of Connecticut
Xinyu Zhao University of Connecticut