Numerical modeling of deforming bubble transport related to cavitating hydraulic turbines

Cavitation is a problem in many hydroelectric power plants since it can cause adverse effects on performance and damage to nearby solid surfaces. The concerns of this thesis are the numerical aspects of flow simulations in cavitating hydraulic turbines which contain several difficulties: turbulent and complex flows, steady and moving parts of the geometry, bubble transport and cavitation development. The focus is on the accuracy and reliability of several different aspects of these difficulties, namely the study of bubble transport without phase change. Two main strategies are chosen. Firstly the investigation of the turbulent bubble-flow interaction in a turbine geometry and secondly the investigation of the bubble deformation and the bubble-flow interaction. Consequently, different methods in order to handling these types of three dimensional multi-phase flows are presented. Volume of Fluid (VOF) is used for immersed fluid-fluid flows and improved methods are presented and evaluated for the phase transport and the interface treatment. This includes the Direction Averaged Normal model (DAN) and the Direction Averaged Curvature model (DAC). The Volume of Solid (VOS) method is also presented and evaluated. VOS is built on VOF and is a second order accurate boundary treatment method in Cartesian grids for both stationary and moving geometries of complex shape. All the methods are tested using different three dimensional cases which leads to a confirmation of the high accuracy. The high accuracy of the VOF model is verified by comparing it with the experimental data for both rising wobbling bubbles and the bubble formation for air injection in the bottom of a water channel. The real advantage of the VOS method is demonstrated for a turbulent flow past a rotating propeller placed in a square channel, where the turbulence and the bubble transport are simulated using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) respectively

High-order surface tension VOF-model for 3D bubble flows with high density ratio

An improved Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is presented which is applicable to high density ratio 3D flows for a large range of bubble Reynolds number (Re). The method is based on the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible multi-phase flows which are discretized on a Cartesian staggered grid. The multi-grid technique together with the pressure-velocity coupling scheme for multi-phase flows have resulted in an efficient solver which nearly exponentially converge with the number of iterations. The convergence speed also shows negligible dependence on density ratio, viscosity ratio and Re. A second-order accurate, non-diffusive, mass conservative phase transport model is presented which does not suffer from unphysical over- or under-shoots of the phase variable. The high accurate normal, curvature and surface tension force model in combination with the high-order defect-correction scheme for multi-phase flows shows second-order global accuracy when applied to the transient bubble rise where the viscosity ratio is equal to one. In contrast, the commonly used viscosity model for VOF introduces a first order error for the same problem. The VOF method has been tested for different types of bubble flows at low Re and for path-oscillating and wobbling air bubbles (in water) with a diameter range of 1.82 < D < 6 mm. The numerical results agree quantitatively with the available experimental data. The investigations show that the proposed high accurate surface tension model can be used successfully for wobbling flows with bubble deformation while maintaining the mass of the phases. The error in mass conservation is directly proportional to the residual in solving the discrete problem. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

LES of hydrogen enriched methane/air combustion in the SGT-800 burner at real engine conditions

DLE (Dry Low Emission) techniques are widely used today to reduce the harmful NOx emissions associated with high combustion temperatures. In many DLE systems the fuel and air are premixed which effectively keep the flame temperature as low as possible, ideally equal to the turbine inlet temperature. By using premixing stability issues such as flash back and combustion driven dynamics may occur. Operating the engine with hydrogen diluted natural gas will decrease the flash back limits of the system due to the high diffusivity and highly reactive nature of hydrogen. In this study the stability effects of hydrogen diluted into methane in the Siemens SGT-800 combustor is studied. The SGT-800 combustor is an annular combustor where the flame is stabilized using a swirl burner combined with a sudden expansion combustor. The expansion gives rise to a vortex break down where the flame stabilizes in the local low speed zones. Here a single burner sector is studied using the flow solver Siemens PLM software STAR-CCM+. The turbulence is simulated through the use of LES (Large Eddy Simulation) where the largest energy carrying flow scales are resolved and only the smaller scales are modelled. The chemistry is coupled to the turbulent flow simulation by the use of FGM (Flamelet Generated Manifolds) which are integrated using presumed probability density functions. The FGM approach assumes that the local flame structure is laminar and that all species across a flame can be related to a set of control variables. The control variables in this case are the heat loss, the mixture fraction and its variance and a reaction progress variable. In this paper two effects are studied, first the transition from an atmospheric flame to a pressurized flame and second the effect of hydrogen enrichment. The flame shape and position are mainly affected by the transition from atmospheric to high pressure, where the power density increases by almost a factor of 20. The flame is moving further upstream closer to the burner in all pressurized cases. The hydrogen enrichment plays a strong role in how the combustion driven dynamics is coupling with the acoustics of the rig. The high pressure pure methane case show a strong pressure peak whereas the hydrogen enriched case dampens that peak and distributes the energy to other frequencies. This work shows that high fidelity CFD is capable of capturing complex flow and flame interactions such as thermoacoustic instabilities in industrial scale systems

Numerical Investigation of Methane/Hydrogen/Air Partially Premixed Flames in the SGT-800 Burner Fitted to a Combustion Rig

The Siemens SGT-800 3rd generation DLE burner fitted to an atmospheric combustion rig has been numerically investigated. Pure methane and methane enriched by 80 vol% hydrogen flames have been considered. A URANS (Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes) approach was used in this study along with the k − ω SST and the k − ω SST-SAS models for the turbulence transport. The chemistry is coupled to the turbulent flow simulations by the use of a laminar flamelet library combined with a presumed PDF. The effect of the mesh density in the mixing and the flame region and the effect of the turbulence model and reaction rate model constant are first investigated for the methane/air flame case. The results from the k − ω SST-SAS along with flamelet libraries are shown to be in excellent agreement with experimental data, whereas the k − ω SST model is too dissipative and cannot capture the unsteady motion of the flame. The k − ω SST-SAS model is used for simulation of the 80 vol% hydrogen enriched flame case without further adjusting the model constants. The global features of the hydrogen enrichment are very well captured in the simulations using the SST-SAS model. With the hydrogen enrichment the time averaged flame front location moves upstream towards the burner exit nozzle. The results are consistent with the experimental observations. The model captures the three dominant low frequency unsteady motion observed in the experiments, indicating that the URANS/LES hybrid model indeed is capable of capturing complex, time dependent, features such as an interaction between a PVC and the flame front

Numerical modelling of micro-droplet formation

The formation of micro-droplets due to a pulsative micro-jet (width of 40 mu m) is studied using the 3D Navier-Stokes equations for multi-phase flows using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) and Volume of Solid (VOS) models. The droplet formation is studied for different transient velocity conditions and mass rates. The numerical results show reasonable agreement with both analytical theory and experimental data. The results show that the surface tension forces are too dominating for the droplets to be released from the constriction opening for a mean jet velocity at the constriction opening of U-jet similar to 1 m/s, that multiple (satellite) droplets are formed for U-jet similar to 10 m/s and that a single droplet may be found for U-jet-values in between. The results also indicate the conditions required in order to achieve repeatedly stable single micro-droplet formation

Investigation of Siemens SGT-800 industrial gas turbine combustor using different combustion and turbulence models

Siemens SGT-800 gas turbine is the largest industrial gas turbine within Siemens medium gas turbine size range. The power rating is 53MW at 39% electrical efficiency in open cycle (ISO) and, for its power range, world class combined cycle performance of >56%. The SGT-800 convectively cooled annular combustor with 30 Dry Low Emissions (DLE) burners has proven, for 50-100% load range, NOx emissions below 15/25ppm for gas/liquids fuels and CO emissions below 5ppm for all fuels, as well as extensive gas fuel flexible DLE capability. In this work the focus is on the combustion modelling of one burner sector of the SGT-800 annular combustor, which includes several challenges since various different physical phenomena interacts in the process. One of the most important aspects of the combustion in a gas turbine combustor is the turbulence chemistry interaction, which is dependent on both the turbulence model and the combustion model. Some turbulence-combustion model combinations that have shown reasonable results for academic generic cases and/or industrial applications at low pressure, might fail when applied to complex geometries at industrial gas turbine conditions since the combustion regime may be different. Therefore is here evaluated the performance of Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) turbulence models combined with different combustion models, which includes the Eddy Dissipation Model (EDM) combined with Finite Rate Chemistry (FRC) using an optimized reduced 4-step scheme and two flamelet based models; Zimont's Burning Velocity model and Lindstedt & Vaos Fractal model. The results are compared to obtained engine data and field experience, which includes for example flame position in order to evaluate the advantages and drawbacks of each model. All models could predict the flame shape and position in reasonable agreement with available data; however, for the flamelet based methods adjusted calibration constants were required to avoid a flame too far upstream or non-sufficient burn out which is not in agreement with engine data. In addition both the flamelet based models suffer from spurious results when fresh air is mixed into fully reacted gases and BVM also from spurious results inside the fuel system. The combined EDM-FRC with a properly optimized reduced chemical kinetic scheme seems to minimize these issues without the need of any calibration, with only a slight increase in computational cost

Numerical and experimental investigations of the Siemens SGT-800 burner fitted to a water RIG

DLE (Dry Low Emission) technology is widely used in land based gas turbines due to the increasing demands on low NOx levels. One of the key aspects in DLE combustion is achieving a good fuel and air mixing where the desired flame temperature is achieved without too high levels of combustion instabilities. To experimentally study fuel and air mixing it is convenient to use water along with a tracer instead of air and fuel. In this study fuel and air mixing and flow field inside an industrial gas turbine burner fitted to a water rig has been studied experimentally and numerically. The Reynolds number is approximately 75000 and the amount of fuel tracer is scaled to represent real engine conditions. The fuel concentration in the rig is experimentally visualized using a fluorescing dye in the water passing through the fuel system of the burner and recorded using a laser along with a CCD (Charge Couple Device) camera. The flow and concentration field in the burner is numerically studied using both the scale resolving SAS (Scale Adaptive Simulation) method and the LES (Large Eddy Simulation) method as well as using a traditional two equation URANS (Unsteady Reynolds Average Navier Stokes) approach. The aim of this study is to explore the differences and similarities between the URANS, SAS and LES models when applied to industrial geometries as well as their capabilities to accurately predict relevant features of an industrial burner such as concentration and velocity profiles. Both steady and unsteady RANS along with a standard two equation turbulence model fail to accurately predict the concentration field within the burner, instead they predict a concentration field with too sharp gradients, regions with almost no fuel tracer as well as regions with far too high concentration of the fuel tracer. The SAS and LES approach both predict a more smooth time averaged concentration field with the main difference that the tracer profile predicted by the LES has smoother gradients as compared to the tracer profile predicted by the SAS. The concentration predictions by the SAS model is in reasonable agreement with the measured concentration fields while the agreement for the LES model is excellent. The LES shows stronger fluctuations in velocity over time as compared to both URANS and SAS which is due to the reduced amounts of eddy viscosity in the LES model as compared to both URANS and SAS. This study shows that numerical methods are capable of predicting both velocity and concentration in a gas turbine burner. It is clear that both time and scale resolved methods are required to accurately capture the flow features of this and probably most industrial DLE gas turbine burners