Pre-mixed Gas turbines

The regulations governing allowable emissions for power plant are now so tight that the fuel used has to be pre-mixed to maximise efficiency. In fact the exhaust gases coming out of power plants these days are often cleaner than the air going in! However the plant that has been designed to produce these very low emission rates does not run reliably because of the unstable nature of the combustion produced. The burning of pre-mixed fuel gives very active flames, which jump around and are susceptible to acoustic coupling. This in turn leads to reduced efficiency in power generation, and difficulties in meeting operating as well as emission targets.

Although engineering solutions have been found to allow gas turbines to run in what is essentially an unstable mode, there is a great deal of research being carried out to improve the design of these types of system. Within CUED, research is being carried out on various different levels: Mathematical models are being developed in order to understand the process. These models are correlated with experimental results, and we are using computational fluid dynamics to look at the resulting heat distributions.

At the level of hardware design, researchers at the Whittle laboratory are improving the efficiency of the turbines, and in this way are looking to increase the efficiency of the power plant.

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