Basis Mode of Turbulent Flame in a Swirl-Stabilized Gas Turbine using LES and POD

Unsteady numerical study has been conducted on combustion dynamics of a lean-premixed swirl-stabilized gas turbine swirl injector. A three-dimensional computation method utilizing the message passing interface (MPI) parallel architecture, large eddy simulation(LES), and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique was applied. The unsteady turbulent flame dynamics are simulated so that the turbulent flame structure can be characterized in detail. It was observed that some fuel lumps escape from the primary combustion zone, and move downstream and consequently produce hot spots. Those flame dynamics coincides with experimental data. In addition, basis modes of the unsteady turbulent flame are characterized using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) analysis. The flame structure based on odd basis modes is apparently larger than that of even ones. The flame structure can be extracted from the summation of the basis modes and eigenvectors at any moment.