Combustion Instabilities in Industrial Gas Turbines—Measurements on Operating Plant and Thermoacoustic Modeling

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Abstract
Measurements of vibration and combustion chamber dynamic pressures have been taken on a number of 150 MW industrial gas turbines operating on pre-mixed natural gas, both during long periods of base-load operation and during short duration load-swings. The data has been analyzed in terms of the frequency and bandwidth of the principle peak in the vibration and pressure spectra as a function of load and other operating parameters. It is observed that bandwidth, which is a measure of the damping of the resonant mode of the combustion chamber’s acoustic resonance, decreases towards zero as the machines approach their combustion stability limits. A theoretical model of the thermoacoustic behavior of the combustion system has been developed to see to what extent the observed behavior on the operational machines can be explained in terms of an acoustic model of the ductwork and a flame characterized simply by a time-delay. This time delay is obtained from the frequency response function of the flame in response to unsteady perturbations in inlet velocity and is calculated using computational fluid dynamics. The model has also been used to illustrate the importance of fuel supply system design in controlling combustion stability. It is shown that stability can be a strong function of the acoustic impedance of the fuel supply and that this can lead to enhanced or reduced stability depending on the flame characteristics. [S0742-4795(00)01403-4]