Colloquia

Samenvatting

With the EU’s aims of being climate-neutral by 2050, the need in-
creases for sustainable fuel sources in the gas turbine industry, with cur-
rent gas turbines commonly operating on natural gas. A promising al-
ternative is hydrogen. There is, however, currently very little knowl-
edge on the flame stabilisation and NxOx emissions in hydrogen combus-
tion, especially at high pressures. Furthermore, hydrogen flames exhibit
significantly different thermoacoustic behaviour than natural gas. The
EU-funded ACCEPT project aims to close this knowledge gap, in part
by means of performance tests of downscaled hydrogen combustors. In
this Master’s thesis, a laboratory scale high-pressure hydrogen combus-
tor is designed for thermoacoustic research in future gas turbine systems.
Specifically, the combustor is designed to operate at pressures up to 10
gauge bar, at a power of 100 kW/bar and comprises a radial swirl burner.
The conceptual design includes flow rate calculations, a P&ID and an ini-
tial burner design. Subsequently, burner design iterations are performed
using CFD simulations, employing the k-ω SST turbulence model and the
Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) combustion model. Mixing is opti-
mized, but flashback issues arose. In the final design, a balance is struck
between mixing quality and risk of flashback. The simulation results are
discussed, along with a mesh dependence study. Finally, the Flame Trans-
fer Function (FTF) is determined for two operating points, in preparation
of the thermoacoustic research.