Fuel combustor

A fuel combustor comprises a chamber with air and fuel inlets and a combination gas outlet. The fuel is supplied to a vaporization zone and fuel and air are mixed in a pair of mixing chambers, each exemplified by a swirl can. The resultant mixture is directed into a combustion zone within the combustor. Heat pipes are arranged with one end portion substantially in the combustion zone and the other end in the vaporization zone of its appropriate mixing chamber. Some of the heat of combustion is thus carried back upstream into the swirl cans, to vaporize the fuel as it enters the vaporization zone in the swirl can, thereby improving vaporization and fuel mixing

Combustor turbulence

The turbulence entering the turbine is produced in the combustor. High turbulence levels from the combustor can alter the location of the transition point on the turbine vane. The dynamics of turbulence and the progress being made in computing the flow are discussed

Semi-supervised cross-entropy clustering with information bottleneck constraint

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised clustering method, CEC-IB, that models data with a set of Gaussian distributions and that retrieves clusters based on a partial labeling provided by the user (partition-level side information). By combining the ideas from cross-entropy clustering (CEC) with those from the information bottleneck method (IB), our method trades between three conflicting goals: the accuracy with which the data set is modeled, the simplicity of the model, and the consistency of the clustering with side information. Experiments demonstrate that CEC-IB has a performance comparable to Gaussian mixture models (GMM) in a classical semi-supervised scenario, but is faster, more robust to noisy labels, automatically determines the optimal number of clusters, and performs well when not all classes are present in the side information. Moreover, in contrast to other semi-supervised models, it can be successfully applied in discovering natural subgroups if the partition-level side information is derived from the top levels of a hierarchical clustering

Supercritical fuel injection system

a fuel injection system for gas turbines is described including a pair of high pressure pumps. The pumps provide fuel and a carrier fluid such as air at pressures above the critical pressure of the fuel. A supercritical mixing chamber mixes the fuel and carrier fluid and the mixture is sprayed into a combustion chamber. The use of fuel and a carrier fluid at supercritical pressures promotes rapid mixing of the fuel in the combustion chamber so as to reduce the formation of pollutants and promote cleaner burning

Turbulent mixing film cooling correlation

Film cooling effectiveness correlation predicts air flow requirement for cooling gas turbine combustors. Turbulent mixing model accounts for mixing rate between cooling film and hot gas stream. Resulting equation correlates data within plus or minus 20 percent

Exhaust emissions from a premixing, prevaporizing flame tube using liquid jet A fuel

Emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and unburned hydrocarbons were measured in a burner where liquid Jet A fuel was sprayed into the heated air stream and vaporized upstream of a perforated plate flameholder. The burner was tested at inlet air temperatures at 640, 800, and 833 K, an inlet pressure of 5.6 X 100,000 N/m squared, a reference velocity of 25 m/sec, and equivalence ratios from lean blowout to 0.7. Nitrogen oxide levels of below 1.0 g NO2/kg fuel were obtained at combustion efficiencies greater than 99 percent. The measured emission levels for the liquid fuel agreed well with previously reported premixed gaseous propane data and agreed with well stirred reactor predictions. Autoignition of the premixed fuel air mixture was a problem at inlet temperatures above 650 K with 104 msec premixing time

Stability relationship for water droplet crystallization with the NASA Lewis icing spray

In order to produce small droplets for icing cloud simulation, high pressure air atomizing nozzles are used. For certain icing testing applications, median drop sizes as small as 5 mm are needed, which require air atomizing pressures greater than 3000 kPa. Isentropic expansion of the ambient temperature atomizing air to atmospheric pressure can result in air stream temperatures of -160 C which results in ice crystals forming in the cloud. To avoid such low temperatures, it is necessary to heat the air and water to high initial temperatures. An icing spray research program was conducted to map the temperatures below which ice crystals form. A soot slide technique was used to determine the presence of crystals in the spray