Flashback Prevention in a Hydrogen-Fueled Reheat Combustor by Water Injection Optimized With Global Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract This paper investigates water injection effects in a simplified Ansaldo GT36 reheat system under realistic conditions of 20 atm using large eddy simulation (LES) coupled with thickened flame modeling and adaptive mesh refinement. The water injection conditions are optimized by performing a parametric study based on global sensitivity analysis (GSA) with a surrogate model based on Gaussian process (GP) to reduce computational cost. In particular, the influence of four design parameters, namely, Sauter mean diameter (SMD), water mass flow, and the angles of the spray's hollow cone, is tested to achieve an optimized solution. In the “dry” case, the LES simulations show several flashback events attributed to compressive pressure waves resulting from auto-ignition in the core flow near the crossover temperature. The use of water injection is found to be effective in suppressing the flashback occurrence. In particular, the global sensitivity analysis shows that the external angle of the spray cone and the mass flow of water are the most important design parameters for flashback prevention. NOx emissions are reduced by about 17% with water injection. Once an optimized condition with water injection is found, a recently proposed method to downscale the combustor to lower pressures is applied and tested. Additional LESs are performed for this purpose at the dry, unstable condition and the “wet,” stable condition. Results show that similar dynamics are predicted at 1 atm, validating the method's robustness. This provides avenues for experimentally testing combustion dynamics at simplified conditions which are still representative of high-pressure practical configurations.