CFD SIMULATION OF A HEAVY DUTY GAS TURBINE COMBUSTOR

The continuous increase in worldwide energy request has made it necessary to study different ways to enhance the energy production efficiency. At the same time, the increase in global warming and the diffusion of ecological awareness campaigns have made sure to ratify a series of laws capable to ensure a decrease in pollutant emissions. The purpose of this thesis is to perform Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations for modelling an industrial gas turbine combustor in order to match the experimental pollutant emissions with the obtained results. To accomplish this task, a full scale 3D model of the combustor has been developed using the CAD software Pro/Engineer, eliminating some superfluous elements form the original geometry. As second step, the model has been imported in CONVERGE, an important and innovative CFD software which bypasses the mesh generation phase in order to decrease the total computational time. In CONVERGE two different combustion models, SAGE and FGM, have been developed and compared. To validate the models, the pollutant emissions of NOx, UHC and CO have been compared with the experimental results. It was found that, even though the FGM model is the faster one in terms of computational time, the SAGE model predicts the concentration of pollutants more precisely compared to the experimental data.