Executive Summary : | A substantial amount of foreign exchange is spent on aviation fuel annually, with huge import burden to our country. This project is aimed at viable use of bio-fuels for aviation thus reducing the carbon footprint, dependency on other countries for fuels while saving a significant amount of foreign exchange. Due to the adverse impact of the use of fossil fuel on the environment and depleting fuel reserves, globally and nationally there is a thrust to develop biofuels for aviation applications. Although biofuels have been successfully used by few airlines for aviation on an experimental basis, they are not widely used to date, but, are expected to be mandated by various legislation and regulations in near future. Few studies have reported increased vibrations in the engines when operated with biojet fuels, which can be detrimental to the long-duration operation of the engines. The physical reasons for such vibrations are still unknown, preventing design modifications for the reduction of such vibrations. Therefore, it is essential to reduce the vibrations during operations using integrated dampers. In the proposed project, a laboratory scale can combustor, representing a single cup burner, will be designed as the test bench. The combustor will be operated over a range of operating conditions representative of practical gas turbine operations and detailed measurement of velocity and pressure fields will be taken. The flow into the combustor and the plenum chamber will be excited acoustically for the baseline configuration without a damper and the response will be measured for both non-reacting and reacting processes to elucidate the effect of forcing on flow-field as well as heat release. Furthermore, detailed emission measurements will be taken for ATF combustion in the combustor as the baseline data. Thereafter, few different damper geometries will be designed and developed and the performance of the combustor with integrated damper will be ascertained through detailed measurement and the best configuration will be down-selected, which will be characterized with ATF and different biofuel blends to establish the efficacy of the developed integrated dampers for abatement of combustion dynamics to enhance the operational life of the engine and reduce maintenance cost. |
