Journal of The Korean Society Combustion ISSN:1226-0959(Print) 2466-2089(Online) 한국연소학회지

A low swirl combustor is an alternative technology to sustain a stable flame and to meet the required emission restriction of industrial gas turbine engines. The flame is lifted above the combustor front wall due to a balance between the flame speed and the local flow velocity. The present study is on the numerical simulations of reacting flows of a low swirl model combustor. The flamelet-generated manifold (FGM) method, which is one of the combustion chemistry reduction techniques, is coupled with a large eddy simulation solver. For a premixed CH₄ and air inflow at an equivalence ratio of 0.65, the combustion flow field in the combustor is investigated for two kinds of core blockage configurations, using three-dimensional large eddy simulations based on FGM. Compared to conventional swirl combustors, the low swirl model combustor presents turbulent core flow through the center body of the swirler, which turns out to play an important role in producing stable lifted flames.