The problems of global warming and energy shortages are important goals that humans in the present era must address. Over the past 20 years, global power generation has been rapidly shifting from thermal power generation to renewable energy such as hy...
The problems of global warming and energy shortages are important goals that humans in the present era must address. Over the past 20 years, global power generation has been rapidly shifting from thermal power generation to renewable energy such as hydro, solar, and wind power. At the same time, global demand for electricity is steadily increasing. The era of electricity will come as the demand for electric vehicles increases due to the lack of existing fossil fuel energy. It is important worldwide to develop sustainable power generation methods for increasing electricity demand. Currently, combined power plants use various fuels such as natural gas, diesel, and crude oil through gas turbines, showing 61% thermal efficiency. However, due to the high entry barriers of gas turbine-related technologies and the avoidance of technology transfer by advanced overseas companies, foreign institutions dominate the market, and huge import costs are being spent. In particular, medium and large gas turbines should be imported at high prices such as complex structures, huge volumes, and professional cooling towers. So people are interested in distributed generation power plants. The popularity of power generation devices is increasing by using micro gas turbines with excellent reliability and operating performance than by using medium and large-sized gas turbine power generation systems. A micro gas turbine is an energy generator with a capacity of 2 to 300 kW. It provides several common functions such as variable speed, high-speed operation, small size, simple operation, easy installation, low maintenance, air bearings, low NOx emissions, and generally recuperators. Micro-gas turbines are generally used as power generation devices for injection power generation systems because they have good operation stability, reliability, and maintenance by reflecting the characteristics of gas turbines.
This study was conducted to optimally design the combustor of a 300 kW micro gas turbine engine currently under development. In order to understand the performance of the designed gas turbine engine, a test 2 kW micro gas turbine engine was manufactured and tested. The performance of the engine can be determined using the test data and problems that occur during the combustion process can be identified. After the test gas turbine engine for a long time, the conclusion that combustion inside the combustion chamber was not uniform was drawn through the surface condition of the liner inside the combustion chamber. To solve the problem, a complementary design of the combustion chamber secondary air inlet position is required. By comparing the model according to the air inlet position through CFD analysis, the model located next to the inlet determined the optimization model.
For the optimal design of the combustion chamber of a 300 kW micro gas turbine engine, a design study was conducted to optimize the shape of the fuel injector nozzle.
To achieve a higher combustion efficiency of the mixed gas in the combustion chamber, first, well-mixed homogeneous gas should be formed to accelerate the flame propagation in the chamber to reach a higher combustion temperature and pressure. In this study, four different shapes of the nozzle hole of the fuel injector were designed, and the mixed gas formation characteristics in the chamber were numerically analyzed. Three parameters—the penetration, diffusivity, and amount of fuel injected—were analyzed and compared to find the optimum shape of the nozzle hole with the highest combustion efficiency in the chamber. CFD analysis was conducted using a general-purpose CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code-named PHOENICS (ver. 2020). Based on the analysis results, it was found that the penetration length (), diffusion angle (θ), and volume flow rate () of the injected fuel of Model 3 had the best injection characteristics for the well-mixed gas formation condition in the combustion chamber. Especially, the volume flow rate of the injected fuel of Model 3, which directly affects the output power of the engine, increased by more than 5%. This result is useful and informative for making a sample combustor for a combustion performance test of the model gas turbine engine. When the PIV experiment was conducted to verify the analysis result of the model nozzle CFD and the results were compared, the aerodynamic characteristics were similar.