Search Results

A gas turbine combustion system is an embodiment of all complexities that engineering equipment can have. The flow is three dimensional, swirling, turbulent, two phase and reacting. The design and development of combustors, until recent past, was an art than science. If one takes the route of development through experiments, it is quite time consuming and costly. Compared to the other two components viz., compressor and turbine, the combustion system is not yet completely amenable to mathematical analysis. A gas turbine combustor is both geometrically and fluid dynamically quite complex. The major challenge a combustion engineer faces is the space constraint. As the combustion chamber is sandwiched between compressor and turbine there is a limitation on the available space. The critical design aspect is in facing the aerodynamic challenges with minimum pressure drop. Accurate mathematical analysis of such a system is next to impossible.

The global flow characteristics such as mean velocity, turbulence intensity and scales of turbulence have been measured in a swirl combustion chamber of a Compression Ignition engine using a constant temperature hot-wire anemometer. The experiments were conducted at 400 rpm under motoring (non-firing) conditions. Ensemble averaging procedure was adopted to calculate the mean velocity and turbulence intensity after comparing the merits and demerits of this method with the Individual Cycle Mean method and the Frequency Separation method. The experimental results indicate that the mean velocity and turbulence intensity show significant spatial and temporal variations in the swirl chamber. These variations are observed to be maximum from 60 deg. bTDC to TDC of compression. The values of mean velocity at chamber periphery are found to be higher than the values near the chamber axis.