Development of an Annular Combustor Chamber

Abstract

To accommodate the customer’s expectations for operational flexibility and low power generation costs, a gas turbine has to be robust, flexible and cost effective. Since its introduction in 1993 and with its more than 7.5 million operating hours and over 54’000 starts, the GT13E2 gas turbine has already demonstrated to be a most flexible and reliable engine. It is being used in connection with many different applications, and meets a very broad range of environment and operation conditions. The GT13E2 upgrade 2012 described in this paper further improves these capabilities. The next generation of GT13E2 combustors is improved for increased lifetime, reduced total life cycle cost and implementation of a low emission dual fuel AEV burner system. The basic design philosophy for the lifetime improvement is adapted from the well-proven GT24 and GT26 annular combustors. The liner segments represent Alstom’s proven technology of sealed TBC coated metallic combustor liners that can expand in their fixations. The application of a thermal barrier coating onto the segments is simple and cost-effective. The design is robust so that the liners have to be checked only at major inspections and are not subject to reconditioning/replacement at hot gas part inspections. The closed-loop cooling arrangement is used for the backside cooling of the hot gas liner segments and to maintain the large structural components at a constant temperature. This combustion segment improvement is combined with the AEV (Advanced EnVironmental) burner. All the mentioned features result in a marked improvement of the operating and cyclic lifetime of the GT13E2 combustor. This paper describes the development and validation process for the implementation of the combustion liner segment technology of the GT13E2. The various design phases from concept development to validation including the generic tests and final engine implementation are described and substantiated.

Investigation of isothermal convective heat transfer in an optical combustor with a low-emissions swirl fuel nozzle

“…Industry often relies on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the analysis of heat transfer within their combustors, supplemented with thermocouple and thermal paint measurements [26,27]. For this reason, Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) calculations using the k-ε turbulence model were also carried out to evaluate the performance of commercial codes in predicting the heat transfer characteristics.…”