RANS NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF LEAN PREMIXED BLUFF BODY STABILIZED COMBUSTOR: COMPARISON OF TURBULENCE MODELS

Many gas turbine combustors use bluff-body flameholders to enhance mixing and maintain flame stabilization inside the combustor. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can greatly help in the design and development of gas turbine combustors. In this regard, CFD analyses using k-ε and Reynold Stress Model (RSM) approaches are being evaluated through simulating the combustion processes inside a bluff body stabilized gas turbine combustor where a mixture of lean premixed methane-air are burnt. The numerical study is performed under a steady state condition utilizing the commercial software ANSYS-FLUENT. The simulated results are compared with available experimental data as well as published simulation results found in the literature. The results are presented and compared in terms of velocity fields, temperature profiles and species distributions. The results show that both adopted turbulence models k-ε and RSM reasonably made a well predictions of the combustion process with such kind of combustor, especially k-ε turbulence model.