Thermoacoustic Analysis of Gas Turbine Combustion Systems Using Unsteady CFD

Unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been used to predict thermoacoustic interaction processes in an industrial gas turbine burner. Because detailed unsteady simulation of an entire gas turbine combustion system is forbiddingly expensive, two different approaches have been applied to overcome this problem. In the first approach, time-domain acoustic boundary conditions are applied to the computational domain of the CFD. The idea is to model in CFD only that part of the problem that cannot be represented by low order (acoustic) models. The advantage is not only that the method is much faster; it also allows changes in acoustic boundary conditions without a need to make a new mesh for the problem. This method introduced here is novel and can be used to apply any (causal) acoustic impedance matrix to a CFD computation. The desired impedance can either be obtained analytically, from an acoustic network model or from an acoustic finite element code. The method has been tested on various test cases and proved to be accurate and robust. First, a simple duct with non reactive flow has been simulated. A non refelecting boundary condition for plane waves has been applied. In a further step the methodology was implemented on a gas turbine burner with combustion. The measured acoustic boundary conditions of a single burner test facility have been applied. The predicted pressure spectra are in reasonable agreement with measured pulsation spectra of a full-scale gas turbine burner in an atmospheric combustion test facility. In the second approach a system identification technique is used in a post-processing step of the CFD results. In this way the transfer function relating the acoustic quantities on both sides of the flame is obtained. This transfer function can then be applied to an acoustic network model of the system. The advantage of this method is that once the transfer matrix of the combustion zone is obtained, the influence of combustion system geometry can be investigated in the low order model, which is very fast. This method has been compared with measured transfer matrices of a full-scale swirl stabilized gas turbine burner and proved to be in good agreement.