High-Temperature Reactive Flow of Combustion Gases in an Expansion Turbine

The analysis of the chemical behavior of the working fluid in gas turbines is usually restricted to the combustion chamber sections. However, the current trend toward higher Turbine Inlet Temperatures (TIT), in order to achieve improved thermal efficiency, will invalidate the assumption of frozen composition of the gases in the first stages of the expansion process. It will become necessary to consider the recombination reactions of the dissociated species, resulting in heat release during expansion. In order to quantify the influence of this reactivity on the performance of high TIT gas turbines, a one-dimensional model of the reactive flow has been developed. Preliminary results were reported in a previous paper. The authors concluded that, in the case of expansion of combustion gases in a subsonic static uncurved distributor nozzle, the residual reactivity must be taken into account above a temperature threshold of around 2000 K. The present study extends these results by investigating the reactive flow in a complete multistage turbine set, including a transonic first-stage nozzle. A key result of this study is that heat release during the expansion process itself will be considerable in future high-temperature gas turbines, and this will have significant implications for turbine design techniques. Furthermore, we show that, at the turbine exit, the fractions of NO and CO are very different from the values computed at the combustor outlet. In particular, NO production in the early part of the expansion process is very high. Finally, the effects of temperature fluctuations at the turbine inlet are considered. We show that residual chemical reactivity affects the expansion characteristics in gas turbines with TITs comparable to those attained by modern high-performance machines.