Gas Turbine Burner Reactor Network Construction and Application

Thommie Nilsson, Cathleen Perlman, Harry Lehtiniemi, Daniel Lörstad, S Möller, Fabian Mauss

Abstract

Through the use of a one-dimensional reactor network, quick engineering studies on temperature and fuel effects in gas turbine burners can be performed. A reactor network description of a combustion process allows for the incorporation of flow-field effects observed in three dimensional simulations and enables application of multi-species reaction mechanisms at affordable computational cost. In this paper we report on a novel, automatic reactor network construction methodology for gas turbine burner simulations. The reactor network is constructed using flow-field data from a Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of a methane Siemens SGT-800 burner [1], operated at a baseline condition. Using homogeneous reactors, the reactor network is used to study the effects of flame temperature and hydrogen content on NO emissions, two properties that were not used for network construction. Stochastic reactors were also applied and the sensitivity on the number of particles and the mixing time constant was investigated. No prior application of stochastic reactor networks in the context of gas turbine burner simulations is known to us.