Simulation of the mixing and reacting fields of Tay-type gas turbine combustor for methane/air and n-heptane/air mixtures utilizing the eddy dissipation model in an open-source solver
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Date
2025-03-05
Authors
Πετράτος, Στέφανος
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on the simulation of the isothermal mixing field and the reacting flow within a Tay-type gas turbine combustor (Rolls-Royce Tay). Initially, an overview of combustion is provided, detailing key combustion parameters and the classification of combustion problems. Subsequently, the primary types of combustors commonly employed in aeronautical applications for aircraft propulsion are introduced, along with an emphasis on their fundamental design requirements. The governing equations for combustion phenomena, including the conservation of mass, momentum, and species mass, are presented and appropriately adapted for application to the current study. The simulation employs the Eddy Dissipation Model (EDM) to account for the interaction between turbulence and chemical reactions, while turbulence itself is modeled using the Lilly-Smagorinsky Large Eddy Simulation (LES) approach. Two separate simulations were conducted with n-Heptane and Methane as the fuel respectively for the study, and the chemical reactions were modeled using a two-step reduced reaction mechanism. This simplified mechanism allows for the accurate prediction of major species, such as CO and CO2, while maintaining computational efficiency. The boundary conditions used in the simulation are detailed, alongside the simplifications and assumptions made to streamline the problem. The geometry was created using the Fusion360 software package and in detail explained in this thesis. Then, the mesh was created using the utilities provided by OpenFOAM such as blockMesh and snappyHexMesh. Lastly, the numerical simulations were executed in the open-source platform OpenFOAM. The results were compared with the experimental measurements of Heitor and Whitelaw. In conclusion, the thesis presents key findings, discusses the agreement between simulation and experimental data, and offers suggestions for future research to further refine and expand upon this work.
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Keywords
Gas turbine combustors, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), OpenFOAM, Eddy dissipation model (EDM), Large eddy simulation (LES)