Nonpremixed Approaches for Fuel Flexible, Low NOx Combustors in High-Efficiency Gas Turbines

Abstract Lean, premixed combustor designs have almost completely replaced nonpremixed combustors for industrial gas turbine applications where NOx emissions are regulated. Nonetheless, these designs have also introduced turndown and fuel flexibility constraints and made combustion instabilities and flashback more problematic. Future gas turbine applications will require combustors to accommodate a range of alternative fuels, provide operational flexibility, and compete for services with a host of new technologies, including energy storage and fuel cells. The purpose of this paper is to propose nonpremixed, multistage designs for the next generation of high turndown, high fuel flexibility, low NOx combustion designs—referred to here as a Nonpremixed, Rich, Relaxation, Lean (NRRL) combustor. The key concept, we explore is nonpremixed combustion, followed by additional fuel mixing to locally fuel-rich conditions, a relaxation stage, and then a lean stage. This nonpremixed approach can handle essentially any fuel composition, including pure hydrogen, liquid fuels, pure methane, pure ammonia, and any combination in between while breaking the NOx-CO tradeoff and reducing combustion instability risk. This paper provides chemical reactor network modeling calculations to identify key kinetic processes and time scales required for such a concept. This concept has completely inverted sensitivities from lean, premixed systems which prefer short residence times, low pressures, and low temperatures to minimize NO formation. This concept prefers long residence times, high pressures, and high temperatures, indicating a very different set of design trades for part load and off-design performance.