Swirl-stabilized burner for premixed and spray combustion

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The requested equipment is a swirl-stabilized burner that will be capable of operating as a lean premixed combustor as well as a combustor employing a liquid fuel spray. Lean premixed combustors are highly susceptible to combustion instabilities, caused by the coupling between heat release fluctuations and combustor acoustics. Thermoacoustic instability represents one of the most challenging and least understood phenomena limiting the advancement of future gas turbine engines. In a very general sense, any disturbance of a compressible gas can be constituted of three types of waves: acoustic, vorticity, and entropy. The first objective of the research to be conducted using the requested burner is understand the physical processes that control the flame dynamics. The experiments targeted for the requested equipment will focus on the underpinnings of the basic mechanisms of thermoacoustic instability so that necessary tools could be developed to predict the conditions under which these instabilities occur. Renewable fuels produced from biomass are expected to constitute a greater portion of the fuel feedstock in the near to midterm. Increased production and use of biofuels will not only benefit the environment but also contribute to the energy security and economic growth. However, there are only a few studies on combustion performance of liquid biofuels for gas turbine applications. Thus, the second objective of the research to be conducted using the requested burner is to isolate the effects of fuel composition and fluid dynamics on emissions from different liquid conventional and biofuels in an atmospheric pressure burner replicating typical features of a gas turbine combustor. The requested burner will also lead to the generation of benchmark sets of data which will be used as a focus for guiding numerical studies of these combustion phenomena. In particular, new, efficient, and accurate combustion models are needed for predicting both the impact on emissions from existing gas turbine engine designs and for designing next-generation, low-emissions, high-fuel-efficient gas turbine engines burning alternative bio-fuels.