Construction of Low NOx and High Stability Flames Aiming at Micro Gas Turbine Combustion

For the micro gas turbine combustor, low NOx emission, high stability and complete combustion are requested. The objective of this study is to construct the flame to establish the above targets. The concepts of the combustor are (1) to use the circulation zone by swirl flow to ensure the flame stability and complete combustion and (2) to induce lean premixed combustion by mixing fuel and air at the inlet of combustor to ensure low NOx emission and prevention of flashback. Town gas is used as the fuel. We conduct experiments using three types of combustor design to investigate the characteristics of NOx and CO emission together with the investigation of the flame stability and visualization of the flame configuration. By improving the premixing of the fuel and air the NOx emission was minimized to get 3ppm (at 0% O2 ) with sufficiently low CO emission.Copyright © 2002 by ASME