Combustion Characteristics of Multicomponent Fuels under Cold Starting Conditions in a Gas Turbine

This paper describes a theoretical study of combustion in mixtures of fuel vapour, droplets and air under conditions representative of cold starting in gas turbines. It combines two previously developed models — one for heterogeneous flame propagation and the other for describing the complex evaporative behaviour of real fuel blends. Both models have been validated against experimental data, and the combined model is used to investigate the effect of fuel properties and injection system performance on minimum ignition energy, blowout velocity, lean extinction limits and related aspects significant for cold starting. Conditions are identified when fuel volatility is important and single component approximations are unrepresentative of real fuel behaviour. Explicit equations are given which predict the vapour pressures of JP-4, Jet A1 and diesel fuel.Copyright © 1991 by ASME

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