An integrated approach to fuel-flexible injector design

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The proposed CRD project between McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Rolls Royce Canada (RRC) represents a major new element in a strategic research program on fuel-flexible ultra-low-emission gas-turbine engines (GTE) for power generation applications. These engines, which typically burn natural gas but are experiencing increased customer demand for operability with renewable alternative fuels, represent a large and growing sector of the power-generation market. Current designs for ultra-low-emission combustors (e.g. Dry Low Emission (DLE) combustors) do not generally allow for broad fuel-flexibility, largely due to insufficient understanding regarding the effects of unconventional fuel compositions on engine-relevant combustion phenomena, such as flashback, blow-off, and emissions. This manifests both as difficulties in heuristically designing fuel-flexible combustors and inaccuracy/unreliability in numerical techniques for simulating the combustor behavior, viz. computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations of turbulent reacting flows. The project partners have collaboratively developed an extensive research and development plan that outlines the necessary critical advancements needed to improve the design of fuel-flexible DLE combustors. The proposed research investigates many of these critical phenomena both experimentally, using laboratory experiments ranging from a fundamental apparatus to an engine-relevant geometry, and computationally, using state-of-the-art turbulent combustion modelling approaches, to improve the design tools available to RRC. These improved tools will enable RRC to design next-generation fuel-flexible combustors with reduced emissions and higher performance.