Review of Fuel/Oxidizer-Flexible Combustion in Gas Turbines

Strict emission control regulations call for continuous advancement in existing combustion and carbon-capture technologies to mitigate the rise in pollutants and greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion. Concurrently, improvements in combustion systems would also yield lower fuel consumption and operational cost with greater efficiency. This review addresses these concerns and presents the overview of different combustion technologies and burner designs for cleaner power generation in gas turbines. Emission characteristics are discussed and compared for different combustion concepts, including lean premixed air combustion and oxy-combustion. Various gas turbine burner technologies, including dry low NOx, enhanced-vortex, perforated-plate, and micromixer burners, are discussed extensively, in terms of their operating principle, fuel flexibility, and potential for superior performance under oxy-combustion conditions. Enhanced-vortex and micromixer burners show remarkable flame stability and fuel flexibility and are thus recommended for implementation with hydrogen enrichment in future oxy-fuel gas turbines. The fuel-flexibility approaches for clean energy production, such as hydrogen combustion, hydrogen-enriched combustion, syngas combustion, ammonia combustion, and fuel blending, are explored as well. With the vast recent advances in the techniques of hydrogen production and storage, hydrogen-fueled gas turbines seem to be the perfect choice for clean energy production. The adiabatic flame temperature is identified as a key controlling parameter for the design of oxidizer-flexible combustors in clean gas turbines.