Development of Criteria for Flameholding Tendencies within Premixer Passages for High Hydrogen Content Fuels
- Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
Due to increasingly stringent air quality requirements stationary power gas turbines have moved to lean-premixed operation, which reduces pollutant emissions but can result in flashback. Flashback can cause serious damage to the premixer hardware. Curtailing flashback can be difficult with hydrocarbon fuels and becomes even more challenging when hydrogen is used as the fuel. The two main approaches for coping with flashback are either to design a combustor that is resistant to flashback, or to design a premixer that will not anchor a flame if flashback occurs. Even with a well-designed combustor flashback can occur under certain circumstances, thus it is necessary to determine how to avoid flameholding within the premixer passageways of a gas turbine. To this end, an experiment was designed that would determine the flameholding propensities at elevated pressures and temperatures of three different classes of geometric features commonly found in gas turbine premixers, with both natural gas and hydrogen fuel. Experiments to find the equivalence ratio at blow off were conducted within an optically accessible test apparatus with four flameholders: 0.25 and 0.50 inch diameter cylinders, a reverse facing step with a height of 0.25 inches, and a symmetric airfoil with a thickness of 0.25 inches and a chord length of one inch. Tests were carried out at temperatures between 300 K and 750 K, at pressures up to 9 atmospheres. Typical bulk velocities were between 40 and 100 m/s. The effect of airfoil’s angle of rotation was also investigated. Blow off for hydrogen flames was found to occur at much lower adiabatic flame temperatures than natural gas flames. Additionally it was observed that at high pressures and high turbulence intensities, reactant velocity does not have a noticeable effect on the point of blow off due in large part to corresponding increases in turbulent flame speed. Finally a semi empirical correlation was developed that predicts flame extinction for both natural gas and hydrogen flames.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- FE0007045
- OSTI ID:
- 1172979
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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