Combustion of Fuel Surrogates: An Application to Gas Turbine Engines

The previously developed approaches for fuel droplet heating and evaporation processes, mainly using the Discrete Multi Component Model (DMCM), are investigated for the aerodynamic combustion simulation. The models have been recently improved and generalised for a broad range of bio-fossil fuel blends so that the application areas are broadened with an increased accuracy. The main distinctive features of these models are that they consider the impacts of species’ thermal conductivities and diffusivities within the droplets in order to account for the temperature gradient, transient diffusion of species and recirculation. A formulation of fuel surrogates is made using the recently introduced model, referred to as “Complex Fuel Surrogate Model (CFSM)”, and analysing their heating, evaporation and combustion characteristics. The CFSM is aimed to reduce the full composition of fuel to a much smaller number of components based on their mass fractions, and to formulate fuel surrogates. Such an approach has provided a proof of concept with the implementation of the developed model into a commercial CFD code ANSYS Fluent. A case study is made for the CFD modelling of a gas turbine engine using a kerosene fuel surrogate, which is the first of its kind. The surrogate is proposed using the CFSM, with the aim to reduce the computational time and improve the simulation accuracy of the CFD model.