A CFD study on thermo-acoustic instability of methane/air flames in gas turbine combustor

Thermo-acoustic instability of methane/air flames in an industrial gas-turbine combustor is numerically investigated adopting CFD analysis. The combustor has 37 EV burners through which methane and air are mixed and then injected into the chamber. First, steady fuel/air mixing and flow characteristics established by the burner are investigated by numerical analysis with single burner. And then, based on information on the flow data, the burners are modeled numerically via equivalent swirlers, which facilitates the numerical analysis with the whole combustion system including the chamber and numerous burners. Finally, reactive flow fields within the chamber are investigated numerically by unsteady analysis and thereby, spontaneous instability is simulated. Based on the numerical results, scaling analysis is conducted to find out the instability mechanism in the combustor and the passive control method to suppress the instability is proposed and verified numerically.