IMPACT OF STEAM-DILUTION ON THE FLAME SHAPE AND COHERENT STRUCTURES IN SWIRL-STABILIZED COMBUSTORS

Humidified gas turbines and steam-injected gas turbines are promising technologies to lower the emissions and increase the efficiency and fuel flexibility of gas turbines. In the current study, the influence of steam-dilution on swirl-stabilized methane and hydrogen-fired flames is experimentally investigated at Reynolds numbers in the range of 22,000 to 32,000. Velocity fields and flame positions were measured using high-speed particle image velocimetry and OH* chemiluminescence. An extension of the quantitative light sheet technique was employed to estimate the temperature fields. The combined results reveal strong changes in the flame position, the velocity field, and the temperature field with increasing rates of steam dilution. In particular, three different flow and flame patterns are encountered: At dry conditions, a V-shaped flame stabilizes in a broad inner recirculation zone with low local turbulent kinetic energy; at moderate steam content, the flame changes into a trumpet-like shape; and at very high rates of steam-dilution, the flame detaches and shows an annular shape. The associated coherent flow structures are extracted from the particle image velocimetry data employing proper orthogonal decomposition. The isothermal flow is dominated by a helical instability arising near the combustor inlet. This structure is completely suppressed for the dry flame and reappears for the heavily steam-diluted detached flame with a similar shape and frequency as for the isothermal case. The flow field of the trumpet-like flame at intermediate to high steam dilution rates features a helical instability of lower frequency that is located further downstream than in the isothermal and very wet case. A conceptional explanation is presented that relates the suppression of the helical instability to the specific encountered temperature fields and flame shapes.