NUMERICAL HEAT TRANSFER ANALYSIS OF AN INNOVATIVE GAS TURBINE COMBUSTOR: COUPLED STUDY OF RADIATION AND COOLING IN THE UPPER PART OF THE LINER

A numerical study of a single can combustor for the GE10 heavy-duty gas turbine, which is being developed at GE-Energy (Oil \& Gas), is performed using the STAR-CD CFD package. The topic of the present study is the analysis of the cooling system of the combustor liner's upper part, named. The study was developed in three steps, using two different computational models. As first model, the flow field and the temperature distribution inside the chamber were determined by meshing the inner part of the liner. As second model, the impingement cooling system of the cold side of the cap was meshed to evaluate heat transfer distribution. For the reactive calculations, a closure of the BML (Bray-Moss-Libby) approach based on Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov theorem was used. The model was implemented in the STAR-CD code using its user coding features. Then the radiative thermal load on the liner walls was evaluated by means of the STAR-CD-native Discrete Transfer model. The selection of the radiative properties of the flame was performed using a correlation procedure involving the total emissivity of the gas, the mean beam length and the gas temperature. The estimated heat flux on the cap was finally used as boundary condition for the calculation of the cooling system, consisting of 68 staggered impingement jet lines on the cold side of the cap. The resulting temperature distribution shows a good agreement with the experimental values measured by thermocouples. The results confirm the validity of the implemented procedure, and point out the importance of a full CFD computation as an additional tool to support classic correlation design procedures.