Experimental study of industrial gas turbine flames including quantification of pressure influence on flow field, fuel/air premixing and flame shape

A commercial swirl burner for industrial gas turbine combustors was equipped with an optically accessible combustion chamber and installed in a high-pressure test-rig. Several premixed natural gas/air flames at pressures between 3 and 6 bar and thermal powers of up to 1 MW were studied by using a variety of measurement techniques. These include particle image velocimetry (PIV) for the investigation of the flow field, one-dimensional laser Raman scattering for the determination of the joint probability density functions of major species concentrations, mixture fraction and temperature, planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) of OH for the visualization of the flame front, chemiluminescence measurements of OH* for determining the lift-off height and size of the flame and acoustic recordings. The results give insights into important flame properties like the flow field structure, the premixing quality and the turbulence–flame interaction as well as their dependency on operating parameters like pressure, inflow velocity and equivalence ratio. The 1D Raman measurements yielded information about the gradients and variation of the mixture fraction and the quality of the fuel/air mixing, as well as the reaction progress. The OH PLIF images showed that the flame was located between the inflow of fresh gas and the recirculated combustion products. The flame front structures varied significantly with Reynolds number from wrinkled flame fronts to fragmented and strongly corrugated flame fronts. All results are combined in one database that can be used for the validation of numerical simulations.