Large-Eddy Simulation of Realistic Gas-Turbine Combustors

Abstract

We will discuss recent progress at Stanford’s ASC center which is aiming at high fidelity numerical simulation of a realistic gas turbine engine which is the overarching problem of the Center.  This presentation will focus on large eddy simulation of the combustor of an operating Pratt and Whitney (P&W) engine.  We have developed a general purpose large eddy simulation (LES) code for numerical simulation of multi-phase reacting flows in complex geometries.  The numerical method is non-dissipative on unstructured meshes with arbitrary elements.  A Lagrangian approach is used to handle liquid fuel drop dynamics, and the chemical reactions are modeled using a dynamic progress variable in conjunction with a flamelet library.  The calculations have been validated extensively against experimental data in both canonical and complex configurations from P&W.  The LES code is being integrated with the turbomachinary code which is Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) based.  Progress in this area will be described.