Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.
This paper addresses the design optimisation methodology
used to optimise a gas turbine combustor exit temperature
profile. The methodology uses computational fluid dynamics
and mathematical optimisation to optimise the combustor exit
temperature profile. The studies from which the results were
derived, investigated geometric variations of a complex
three-dimensional flow field in a gas turbine combustor. The
variation of geometric parameters impacts on mixing
effectiveness, of which the combustor exit temperature
profile is a function. The combustor in this study is an
experimental liquid-fuelled atmospheric combustor with a
turbulent diffusion flame. The computational fluid dynamics
simulations use the Fluent code with a standard k-ε model.
The optimisation is carried out with the Dynamic-Q
algorithm, which is specifically designed to handle
constrained problems where the objective and constraint
functions are expensive to evaluate. All the optimisation
cases investigated led to an improved combustor exit
temperature profile as compared to the original one.
