High Pressure Combustion Test Rig for 10 MW Full Scale Gas Turbine Combustors

Abstract

This paper reports about a high pressure combustion test rig which was designed and erected inside the laboratory of the Institute of Steam and Gas Turbine (IDG, RWTH Aachen University, Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dieter Bohn) in the time period from 1992. The first cold start-up was done to test and adjust the complex infrastructure including monitoring and control. The first hot start-up followed in May 2009 with a can-type combustor for a 7 MWel gas turbine. Thereafter, different gas turbine combustors have been tested and optimized with regard to NOx emission and combustor stability (see Tanaka et al. [1]). This test rig is designed to conduct combustion tests with unscaled gas turbine combustors with a thermal power of up to 10 MW and exhaust gas temperatures of up to 1350°C. The test rig is capable of achieving air inlet conditions of up to 24 bar, 550°C and 12 kg/s. After a successful phase of operation, the test rig has been continuously modified and upgraded at the Institute for Power Plant Technology, Steam and Gas Turbines (IKDG, RWTH Aachen University, Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Manfred Wirsum). This paper introduces the current test rig. First, the test rig is classified in relation to similar test rigs by relevant literature. Thereafter, the test rig design and operation mode is presented in detail including a quality evaluation of the combustor inlet conditions. Furthermore, a steady-state simulation is set up. Based on its results, the theoretical operating ranges and limitations are identified and discussed.

Coupled interactions of a helical precessing vortex core and the central recirculation bubble in a swirl flame at elevated power density

“…Experimental studies on the role of a PVC in relation to combustion dynamics are far fewer at elevated pressure and temperatures conditions where industrial engines operate. This is attributed to the increased infrastructure requirements as only a few research labs in the world have capabilities to operate combustors at the megawatt level [15][16][17][18]. Combined with the requirements of optical access for laser diagnostics, the sparsity of such investigations in the literature is perhaps unsurprising.…”

Large eddy simulation of CH4-air and C2H4-air combustion in a model annular gas turbine combustor

“…Combustor operating conditions leading to instabilities are almost impossible to predict a priori, and are often only discovered during engine testing, and are thus expensive to cure. To complement full-scale engine tests, [4], we rely on thermo-acoustic solvers, [5], and reduced order models, [6], using flame transfer functions, [7], to identify problematic conditions and engine designs that may promote instabilities. A strategy under development is to use massively parallel finite rate chemistry Large Eddy Simulations (LES) to compute the unsteady dynamics of a complete gas turbine combustor, [8][9].…”