Integration of simulation tools for the development of a pressure gain gas turbine

Abstract

This master’s thesis was part of novel pulse gas turbine developing project. The operating principle of the company's pulse gas turbine differs from the ordinary gas turbine due to the intermittently operating combustion chamber. The first object in the thesis was to investigate pressure gain combustion. The aim was also to explore what kind of existing applications have been made. Another subject was to integrate two simulation tools for producing new types of simulation results. GT-POWER and CONVERGE were selected for the simulation tools.

The theoretical part introduces gas turbine technology generally. Theory includes the op- erational principle, applications, components and environmental impact. The theoretical part also introduces pressure gain combustion, which is the main development target in the company's gas turbine. Mainly there are presented combustion models, thermody- namic analysis and the difference to normal gas turbine combustion technology. After that, the existing technologies are presented.

The major focus concentrated on integrating the simulation tools. The research problem was to achieve coupled simulation run with the software. The idea was that GT-POWER calculates system performance and CONVERGE calculates burning in the combustion chamber. Coupled simulation was achieved after preparations and set-up process.

Simulation results were examined from a full pulse gas turbine model followed by a halved model. Halved model was made because the full model was not working properly. The models were first run alone in GT-POWER to have comparable results. After this, models were run with coupled simulation. The purpose was to examine what kind of dif- ference the CFD connection causes to simulation results. The results of the halved model showed that coupled simulation provides more accurate results than GT-POWER only.