Abstract
With the ever-increasing drive to design more clean and efficient gas-turbine combustors, operational conditions of the civil aero engines have been drifting towards leaner fuel-air ratio configurations. Such configurations demand careful designing of engines, keeping multiple conflicting goals in mind. One of the critical aspects is keeping the combustor designs capable of giving excellent Relight performance under all susceptible conditions.
High-fidelity simulation methods can provide comprehensive insights about Relight process but at the same time becomes computationally prohibitive to perform relevant studies of ignition-probability for real-life gas-turbine combustors. Another family of ‘Particle-based/Cellular Automation’ models comes handy to bridge this gap, as they can provide reasonable information about ignition probability for a given spark location and flow-condition, with a much lesser computational cost.
This work reviews some of the phenomena-based models proposed in recent pasts and uses one of the flame-particle based models to validate standard experimental work published for diffusion flames involving gaseous fuels. This method is extended to improve the visualization aspect of representative flame and to track independent flares from multiple spark locations in a single setup.
The validated approach is tested on five swirled injectors designed by CORIA in the context of Knowledge for Ignition, Acoustics, and Instabilities (KIAI) project, to evaluate its applicability in predicting ignition sequence and ignition probability for complex configurations. Implemented particle-based model found to predict reasonably good results for all evaluated configurations.
