Impact of flame stretch and heat loss on heat release distributions in gas turbine combustors: Model comparison and validation

The work presented in this paper comprises the application of an extension for the Flamelet Generated Manifold model which allows to consider elevated flame stretch rates and heat loss. This approach does not require further table dimensions. Hence, the numerical overhead is negligible, preserving the industrial applicability. A validation is performed in which stretch and heat loss dependent distributions are obtained from the combustion model to compare them to experimental data from an atmospheric single burner test rig operating at lean conditions. The reaction mechanism is extended by OH^∗-kinetics which allows the comparison of numerical OH^∗-concentrations with experimentally obtained OH^∗-chemiluminescence. Improvement compared to the Flamelet Generated Manifold model without extension regarding the shape and position of the turbulent flame brush can be shown and are substantiated by the validation of species distributions which better fit the experimental in situ measurements when the extension is used. These improvements are mandatory to enable subsequent modeling of emissions or thermoacoustics where high accuracy is required. In addition to the validation, a qualitative comparison of further combustion models is performed in which the experimental data serve as a benchmark to evaluate the accuracy. Most combustion models typically simplify the combustion process as flame stretch or non-adiabatic effects are not captured. It turns out that the tested combustion models show improvement when stretch or heat loss is considered by model corrections. However, satisfactory results could only be achieved by considering both effects employing the extension for the Flamelet Generated Manifold model.