25th Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, 3 - 8 September 2006, Hamburg, Germany
Paper ICAS 2006-5.3.4
STAGNATION-POINT REVERSE FLOW COMBUSTOR PERFORMANCE WITH LIQUID FUEL INJECTION
J. Crane, Y. Neumeier, J. Jagoda, J. Seitzman, B. T. Zin
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Keywords: SPRF, ultra-low, NOx, CO, Jet-A
This paper describes an investigation of the
performance of the recently developed ultra low
emissions, Stagnation-Point Reverse-Flow
(SPRF) Combustor when burning liquid fuels
(Jet-A and heptane). This study has been
undertaken because of the need to burn liquid
fuels with low emissions in gas turbines that are
used, for example, in aircraft engines, landbased
power generation, and marine
applications. In contrast with state of the art
combustors, in which the reactants and products
enter and leave the combustor through opposite
ends of the combustor, the reactants and
products enter and leave the SPRF combustor
through the same plane opposite a closed end.
The design of the SPRF combustor allows
mixing of reactants with hot combustion
products and radicals within the combustor,
prior to combustion. Thus, no external
premixing of fuel and air is required.
Additionally, since the air and fuel enter
opposite the closed end of the combustor, they
must stagnate near the closed end, thus
establishing a region of low velocity just
upstream of the closed end that helps stabilize
the combustion process. This apparently
produces a low-temperature, stable, distributed
reaction zone. Previous studies with the SPRF
combustor investigated its performance while
burning natural gas. This paper presents the
results of SPRF combustor studies using liquid
fuels, both heptane and Jet-A. The performance
of the combustor was investigated using an
airblast fuel injector, which is suitable for the
low fuel flow rates used in laboratory
experiments. To reduce pressure losses across
the injector, a diffuser was incorporated into an
airblast injector. It was found that stable
combustor operation was achieved burning Jet-
A with emissions of less than 1 ppm NOx and 5
ppm CO, pressure losses less than 5 percent,
and a power density on the order of 10 MW/m3
in atmospheric pressure. This power density
would linearly scale to 300 MW/m3 in a
combustor at a pressure of 30 atmospheres.
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