ABSTRACT
The combustor is a critical component of gas turbine engines. It must efficiently burn fuel/air mixtures, cool combustor walls, dilute the gas mixing entering the turbine, and minimize overall pressure loss. This article discusses numerical simulations of the aerodynamic and combustion processes occurring inside an actual annular gas turbine combustor. A high-accuracy MicroScribe-GX2 3-D digitiser successfully scans a three-dimensional combustor model. The simulations were performed by Star-CCM+ software using RANS and the Steady Laminar Flamelet approach. The results show the flow structure, total pressure loss, temperature field, and gas components in the combustor under nominal conditions with cold and hot tests. In the cold test, the output velocity is lower than in the hot test; the total pressure loss is around 0.05. Approximately 20% of the flow passes through the swirlers for combustion, 30% for cooling the liner walls, and 50% through the dilution zone. The combustible gas has an average temperature of 1120 K and a maximum speed of 126 m/s entering the turbine.
