ABSTRACT
Gas turbine engines have been widely used in electrical power generation for decades. More recently, there has been an increasing interest in optimizing gas turbine design and operation to improve fuel efficiency and to reduce pollution together with enhanced fuel flexibility under greater variable loads and ramp rate conditions. Fiber optical sensor (FOS) technology is now becoming available that is capable of providing critical real-time information regarding the onset of combustion instabilities in the hitherto inaccessible region of the gas turbine combustor. At ultra-high temperatures, thermocouples suffer from increased drift and reliability problems. A unique advantage of fiber Bragg grating-based FOS systems is their ability to measure at multiple discrete positions along a single fiber strand. This enables, for instance, densely spaced gas turbine exhaust gas temperature measurements that would be difficult to implement using conventional thermocouples due to the significant amount of electrical wiring required.
