UC Irvine

The measurement techniques for delineating fuel-air mixing and transport in gas turbine combustion, as well as examples of representative results, are provided in this overview. The summary is broken into applications for gaseous fuels and liquid fuels since many diagnostics which are specific to the phase of the fuel have been developed. Many possible methods for assessing the general mixing have been developed, but not all have been applied to practical systems either under scaled or under actual conditions. With respect to gaseous mixing processes, planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) based on acetone is now starting to be successfully applied to actual systems and conditions. In spray-fired systems, the need to discriminate between phases leads to considerable complication in delineating fuel-air mixing. Methods that focus on the discrete phase have successfully provided details relative to the droplets. These include phase Doppler interferometry (PDI), which is becoming ubiquitous in application to practical devices and under practical conditions. PDI is typically being applied to quantify droplet sizes, although the volume flux, which is relevant to fuel-air mixing, in practical systems is also being reported. In addition, PLIF strategies that focus upon the behaviour of the droplets are now being developed. However, PLIF strategies that can discriminate between phases either in the fuel or with respect to the liquid fuel and combustion air are also being developed. In terms of characterizing the vector fields associated with the mixing process, laser anemometry (LA), although it is tedious to apply, has proven reliable even in the presence of droplets. Newer methods such as DPIV and FRS have seen only limited application in practical systems but appear promising. In terms of scalar fields, LIF and PLIF have also been applied successfully to these systems, and examples of the measurements of concentrations of various radical species such as OH are found throughout the literature.