Development of fuel-flexible gas turbine combustor for premixed oxy-combustion of syngas fuel

The use of gas turbines in combined cycles is an effective technique for power generation in power plants, especially in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, strict regulations of harmful pollutants emissions are continuously updated, keeping much pressure on the development and adaptation of gas turbines to match such regulations. There is a trend of using lean premixed combustion technology to replace non-premixed technology in novel gas turbines to control combustion temperature and NOx emissions. Also, oxy-combustion is considered a new trending technology for capture of CO2 and complete control of NOx emissions. Combining both premixed and oxy-combustion technologies may be also a trending choice toward complete control of emissions while capturing CO2. However, these technologies bring their own challenges in terms of combustion stability and combustor efficiency. Different fuels have different combustion and emission characteristics, which means different combustor stability behaviours at different loading conditions can be obtained using different fuels. This necessitates the development of fuel-flexible burners that can handle different fuels based on the loading conditions to sustain stable flame under premixed oxy-combustion conditions. In this study, a fuel-flexible environmental-friendly swirl-stabilized laboratory-scale gas turbine combustor will be designed and established to hold oxy-combustion premixed flames of different fuels. Detailed measurements along with numerical simulations to characterize different flames utilizing different fuels will be performed on a fuel-flexible gas turbine combustor adapting premixed oxy-combustion technology targeting proper application of this novel technology in the energy sector. The main objective of this study is the better understanding of the effect of fuel composition on premixed oxy-combustion in gas turbines in terms of flame stability and emissions, and to generate a generalized stability map considering different fuels at different loading conditions. The zones of stable flames of the different fuels at different operating conditions will be highlighted on the obtained generalized stability map to specify the perfect fuel to be used at a given load requirement. A special emphasis will be made on the performance of gas turbine combustor adapting hydrogen-rich syngas oxy-combustion technology, forced by the rising interest of this technology in combined cycle power plants. The combined effect of premixing and oxy-combustion, for controlling the emissions of NOx and CO2 while keeping the same output power, on flame stability and exhaust emissions will be investigated experimentally and numerically considering different fuel compositions. A CFD computational procedure will be developed for investigating the combustion and emission characteristics of turbulent reacting flow inside a fuel-flexible environmental-friendly swirl-stabilized gas turbine combustor adapting premixed oxy-combustion technology for burning different fuels and compare the results with the recorded experimental data.