No abstract

Gas turbines for power generation are optimised to run with fossil fuels but as a response to tighter pollutant regulations and to enable the use of renewable fuels there is a great interest in improving fuel flexibility. One interesting renewable fuel is syngas from biomass gasification but its properties vary depending on the feedstock and gasification principle, and are significantly different from conventional fuels. This paper aims to give an overview of the differences in combustion behaviour by comparing numerical solutions with methane and several different synthesis gas compositions. The TECFLAM swirl burner geometry, which is designed to be representative of common gas turbine burners, was selected for comparison. The advantage with this geometry is that detailed experimental measurements with methane are publicly available. A two-stage approach was employed with development and validation of an advanced CFD model against experimental data for methane combustion followed by simulations with four syngas mixtures. The validated model was used to compare the flame shape and other characteristics of the flow between methane, 40% hydrogen enriched methane and four typical syngas compositions. It was found that the syngas cases experience lower swirl intensity due to high axial velocities that weakens the inner recirculation zone. Moreover, the higher laminar flame speed of the syngas cases has a strong effect on the flame front shape by bending it away from the axial direction, by making it shorter and by increasing the curvature of the flame front. A hypothesis that the flame shape and position is primarily governed by the laminar flame speed is supported by the almost identical flame shapes for bark powder syngas and 40% hydrogen enriched methane. These gas mixtures have almost identical laminar flame speeds for the relevant equivalence ratios but the heating value of the syngas is more than a factor of 3 smaller than that of the hydrogen enriched methane. The syngas compositions used are representative of practical gasification processes and biomass feedstocks. The demonstrated strong correlation between laminar flame speed and flame shape could be used as a rule of thumb to quickly judge whether the flame might come in contact with the structure or in other ways be detrimental to the function of the combustion system.

No abstract

This paper assesses the validity of the Two-Step, One-Way (TSOW) coupled method for computational fluid dynamics, which splits a complicated geometry into an upstream and a downstream part. The problem is solved in two steps: first, the upstream part using approximate downstream boundary conditions, followed by a solution of the downstream flow where the inlet boundary conditions are extracted from the upstream solution. The method is based on two assumptions: first, the solution for the upstream part should be identical in the common domain to a complete solution. Second, the solution for the downstream part should be identical in the common domain to a complete solution. The resulting agreement between the upstream solution and the full solution was excellent, except in the vicinity of the outflow boundary. For the assessment of the second assumption, the downstream flow was simulated with two sets of boundary conditions, one that was extracted from the full simulation, and one that came from the upstream part solution. The two solutions in the downstream geometry with slightly different boundary conditions agreed excellently with each other but exhibited small differences from the full solution. Overall, the difference to the full solution is judged to be acceptable for many engineering design situations. The solution time for the TSOW method was about 23 h faster than the full solution, which took about 85 h on the same hardware. For additional design iterations, where the same upstream geometry can be used, a 30-h gain would be obtained for each step.

The 3rd author name has been updated. The original article has been corrected.Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.