Thermoacoustic stability analysis is an essential part of the engine development process. Typically, thermoacoustic stability is determined by hybrid approaches such as network models or Helmholtz solvers. These approaches require information on the flame dynamic response. The combined approach of advanced System identification (SI) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is an efficient strategy to compute the flame dynamic response to flow perturbation in terms of the Finite Impulse Response (FIR). The identified FIR is uncertain due in part to the aleatoric uncertainties caused by applying SI on systems with combustion noise and partly due to epistemic uncertainties caused by lack of knowledge of operating or boundary conditions. Carrying out traditional uncertainty quantification techniques, such as Monte Carlo, in the framework of LES/SI would be computationally prohibitive. As a result, the present paper proposes a methodology to build a surrogate model in the presence of both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. More specifically, we propose a univariate Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate model, where the final trained GP takes into account the uncertainty of SI and the uncertainty in the combustor back plate temperature, which is known to have considerable impact on the flame dynamics. The GP model is trained on the FIRs obtained from the LES/SI of turbulent pre-mixed swirled combustor at different combustor back plate temperatures. Due to the change in the combustor back plate temperature the flame topology changes, which in turn influences the FIR. The trained GP model is successful in interpolating the FIR with confidence intervals covering the “true” FIR from LES/SI.

Pilot flames are commonly used to extend combustor operability limits and suppress combustion oscillations in low-emissions gas turbines. Combustion oscillations, a coupling between heat release rate oscillations and combustor acoustics, can arise at the operability limits of low-emissions combustors where the flame is more susceptible to perturbations. While the use of pilot flames is common in land-based gas turbine combustors, the mechanism by which they suppress instability is still unclear. In this study, we consider the impact of a central jet pilot on the stability of a swirl-stabilized flame in a variable-length, single-nozzle combustor. Previously, the pilot flame was found to suppress the instability for a range of equivalence ratios and combustor lengths. We hypothesize that combustion oscillation suppression by the pilot occurs because the pilot provides hot gases to the vortex breakdown region of the flow that recirculate and improve the static, and hence dynamic, stability of the main flame. This hypothesis is based on a series of experimental results that show that pilot efficacy is a strong function of pilot equivalence ratio but not pilot flow rate, which would indicate that the temperature of the pilot gases as well as the combustion intensity of the pilot flame play more of a role in oscillation stabilization than the length of the pilot flame relative to the main flame. Further, the pilot flame efficacy increases with pilot flame equivalence ratio until it matches the main flame equivalence ratio; at pilot equivalence ratios greater than the main equivalence ratio, the pilot flame efficacy does not change significantly with pilot equivalence ratio. To understand these results, we use large-eddy simulation to provide a detailed analysis of the flow in the region of the pilot flame and the transport of radical species in the region between the main flame and pilot flame. The simulation, using a flamelet/progress variable-based chemistry tabulation approach and standard eddy viscosity/diffusivity turbulence closure models, provides detailed information that is inaccessible through experimental measurements.

The present paper summarizes the development of a Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) based approach for the prediction of CO emission in an industrial gas turbine combustor. Since the operating point of the modern combustors is really close to the extinction limit, the availability of a tool able to detect the onset of high-CO production can be useful for the proper definition of the combustion chamber air split or to introduce design improvements for the premixer itself. The accurate prediction of CO cannot rely on the flamelet assumption, representing the fundament of the modern combustion models. Consequently, in this work, the Extended Turbulent Flame Speed Closure (ETFSC) of the standard Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) model is employed to consider the effect of the heat loss and the strain rate on the flame brush. Moreover, a customized CO-Damköhler number is introduced to de-couple the in-flame CO production region from the post-flame contribution where the oxidation takes place. A fully premixed burner working at representative values of pressure and flame temperature of an annular combustor is selected for the validation phase of the process. The comparison against the experimental data shows that the process is not only able to capture the trend but also to predict CO in a quantitative manner. In particular, the interaction between the flame and the air fluxes at some critical sections of the combustor, leading the CO emission from the equilibrium value to the super-equilibrium, has been correctly reproduced.

In this paper, we discuss the development of a non-intrusive surface temperature sensor based on long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral technology. The LWIR detection enables to minimize optical interferences from hot combustion gases (emission mostly within UV-MWIR region). Utilization of hyperspectral detection allows to further improve temperature measurement accuracy and precision. The developed sensor with fiber coupling provides the required flexibility to be maneuvered around/through combustor hardware. The LWIR fiber probe is fully protected by the custom-designed water-cooled probe housing. This device is designed to sustain temperature of 2400 K at pressure of 50 bar, which enables long-term optical diagnostics inside the practical high-pressure combustion facilities where extreme thermal acoustic perturbation and intense heat fluxes are present. The housing featured a diamond window to selectively measure spectra in the LWIR region to get accurate surface temperature exclusively of the combustor wall. The probe was installed into a RQL style combustor to get surface temperature of both hot and cold side of the combustor wall. Further, pointwise heat flux estimates across the combustion liner wall was derived using the temperature measurements.

Burning carbon-free fuels such as hydrogen in gas turbines promises power generation with strongly reduced greenhouse gas emissions. A two-stage combustor architecture with a propagation-stabilized flame in the first stage and an autoignition-stabilized flame in the second stage allows for efficient combustion of hydrogen fuels. However, interactions between the autoignition-stabilized flame and the acoustic field of the combustor may result in self-sustained oscillations of the flame front position and heat release rate, which severely affect the stable operation of the combustor. We study one such ‘intrinsic’ mode of interaction wherein acoustic waves generated by the unsteady flame front travel upstream and modulate the incoming mixture resulting in flame front oscillations. In particular, we study the response of an autoignition-stabilized flame to upstream traveling acoustic disturbances in a simplified one-dimensional configuration. We first present a numerical framework to calculate the response of autoignition-stabilized flames to acoustic and entropy disturbances in a one-dimensional combustor. The flame response is computed by solving the energy and species mass balance equations, coupled with detailed chemistry. We validate the framework with compressible direct numerical simulations. Lastly, we present results for the flame response to upstream traveling acoustic perturbations. The results show that autoignition-stabilized flames are highly sensitive to acoustic temperature fluctuations and exhibit a characteristic frequency-dependent response. Acoustic pressure and velocity fluctuations can either constructively or destructively superpose with temperature fluctuations, depending on the mean pressure and relative phase between the fluctuations. The findings of the present work are essential for understanding and modeling the intrinsic feedback mechanism in combustors with autoignition-stabilized flames.

In this paper, a dynamic adaptive mesh refinement method is used in conjunction with a hybrid scale-resolving turbulence model to solve industrial combustion problems. The objective of the adaption method is to track and resolve characteristic turbulent structures arising from swirlers, pilot injectors and flame propagation in industrial burner configurations. By employing Polyhedral Unstructured Mesh Adaption (PUMA) ® within Ansys Fluent ® solver, local regions of mesh are refined to capture gradients in temperature, velocity and other key variables. For Scale-Resolving Simulations (SRS), highly refined meshes are required to resolve a sufficient range of turbulent scales. In this work, a strategy is proposed to evaluate the scale-resolving quality of the mesh and to refine it dynamically in a transient simulation. The condition used for adapting the mesh is based on the gradients of key variables such as temperature and velocity, whilst the large-scale eddies are resolved using an approach based on the LES mesh resolution index. This strategy is then applied to a series of test cases (a diffusion jet flame, a bluff-body premixed flame and a swirl stabilized flame), using the hybrid Stress-Blended Eddy Simulation (SBES) turbulence model and a Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) combustion model. The numerical results are compared with available experimental data, and the accuracy of the solutions is discussed.

For the thermal design of combustion chambers and turbine blades in jet engines, a detailed knowledge of the combustion and of the heat loads to the walls is necessary. In general, high operating temperatures and reduced combustor size are striven for in order to increase engine efficiency and reduce weight. Consequently, the components are exposed to temperatures above the melting point of the materials and there is a growing risk of in-complete combustion within the combustion chambers. To study these effects, we set up a new test bench for fundamental investigation of chemical near-wall reactions at atmospheric pressure. First results of gaseous, non-premixed near-wall CH4/air and H2/air flames are presented. Optical methods such as two-line laser-induced fluorescence themometry and OH* chemiluminescence were applied. Further, the heat release to the wall was determined by means of inverse heat conduction calculation using the data of implemented thermocouples.

This paper presents a numerical investigation on the flow characteristics in a cover-plate pre-swirl system. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations, coupled with the standard k-ε turbulent model, are adopted and solved. With the inlet total pressure and total temperature being constant, the influences of the temperature reduction and flow resistance by changing pressure ratios and rotational Reynolds numbers were conducted. Flow features in the pre-swirl nozzle, pre-swirl cavity, receiver hole and cover-plate cavity were summarized. The results obtained in this study indicate that the pressure ratio and rotational Reynolds number have a significant influence on the vortex structure of the pre-swirl system. As the air is accelerated by the pre-swirl nozzle, the difference of circumferential velocity between the air and the rotational domain would be reduced, and the static temperature of the air would be decreased. The pressure drop in the pre-swirl system mainly occurs in the pre-swirl nozzle and the pre-swirl cavity. In addition, with the increase of the pressure ratio, the air mass flow rate and the circumferential velocity of the air out of the nozzle increased, thereby leading to an increment in temperature reduction. Moreover, with the increasing of the rotational Reynolds number, the dimensionless mass flow rate and temperature reduction of the pre-swirl system, which are mainly determined by the flow incidence angle of cooling air at the receiver hole, will first increase to a maximum and then decrease.

Thermoacoustic characterization of gas turbine combustion systems is of primary importance for successful development of gas turbine technology, to meet the stringent targets on pollutant emissions. In this context, it becomes more and more necessary to develop reliable tools to be used in the industrial design process. The dynamics of a lean-premixed full-annular combustor for heavy-duty applications has been numerically studied in this work. The well-established CFD-SI method has been used to investigate the flame response varying operational parameters such as the flame temperature (global equivalence ratio) and the fuel split between premixed and pilot fuel injections: such a wide range experimental characterization represents an opportunity to validate the employed numerical methods and to give a deeper insight into the flame dynamics. URANS simulations have been performed, due to their affordable computational costs from the industrial perspective, after validating their accuracy through the comparison against LES results. Furthermore, an approach where the pilot and the premixed flame responses are analyzed separately is proposed, exploiting the independence of their evolution. The calculated FTFs have been implemented in a 3D FEM model of the chamber, in order to perform linear stability analysis and to validate the numerical approach. A boundary condition for rotational periodicity based on Bloch-Wave theory has been implemented into the Helmholtz solver and validated against full-annular chamber simulations, allowing a significant reduction in computational time. The reliability of the numerical procedure has been assessed through the comparison against full-annular experimental results.

The linearized Euler equations (LEE) provide an accurate — yet computationally efficient — description of propagation and damping of acoustic waves in geometrically complex, non-uniform reactive mean flows like those found in gas turbine combustion chambers. However, direct application of the LEE to perfectly premixed combustors with highly turbulent flows overestimates entropy waves as the LEE solution inherently contains coupled acoustic, vortical and entropy modes. In the present work, the LEE are decomposed into isentropic and non-isentropic parts ultimately obtaining a simplified set of isentropic LEE, in which only acoustic and vortical modes propagate. In the isentropic LEE, only continuity and momentum equations need to be solved. The energy equation is replaced by the isentropic relation between acoustic pressure and density. From the decomposition, the unsteady heat release term, which acts as a source in the energy equation, naturally arises as a source in the continuity equation. This way, the thermoacoustic coupling is still preserved in the isentropic formulation. The derived isentropic set of equations is first tested with a one-dimensional benchmark configuration consisting of a mean flow temperature jump, non-uniform mean flow velocity and unsteady heat release sources. Solutions of the non-isentropic and isentropic set of LEE are compared and the avoidance of entropy waves proved. Finally, isentropic LEE are used for reproducing the frequency of the self-excited first transversal mode of a lab-scale swirl-stabilized premixed combustor. Furthermore, isentropic and non-isentropic LEE solutions are compared. The non-isentropic LEE yield too high levels of entropy at the combustor exit that may explain the increased damping rate of the non-isentropic LEE solution compared to the isentropic LEE solution. This shows the relevance of isentropic LEE for correctly predicting thermoacoustic stability limits at high frequencies in relevant industrial applications.

This work provides a numerical investigation of the effects of micro field emission dielectric barrier discharge (FE-DBD) plasma actuation on the performance of a micro-combustion system composed of two straights perpendicular microchannels for propellant injection followed by a rectangular micro-combustion chamber in a T-shaped planar configuration. Concerning the modeling, a novel two-step approach has been developed. The first step consisted in solving the chemistry of a sinusoidal plasma discharge in a zero-dimensional modeling. To this purpose, the collisional processes involved in the plasma discharge have been solved using a Boltzmann-equation approach, which permits to predict the electron impact reactions based on a two-temperature model. Furthermore, the zero-dimensional hypothesis used for computations assumed uniform plasma during the overall discharge duration. Concerning the plasma chemistry, excitation and de-excitation processes, electron-ion recombination reactions, attachment and detachment for electrons and neutral species have been considered in order to improve the prediction accuracy. This step allowed to quantify the body force, the heat source and the propellant composition modification induced by sinusoidal plasma actuation operating at 10 MHz of repetition rate, atmospheric pressure and 300 K temperature. Therefore, the predicted cycle averaged plasma effects have been used in 2D steady-state simulations of the laminar, compressible, reactive micro flow, based on a continuum Navier-Stokes approach. SIMPLE pressure-velocity coupling scheme was chosen with a second order pressure spatial discretization. A second-order upwind scheme was applied. The hydrogen-oxygen combustion has been modeled using the Connaire mechanism. The comparison between the results of the reference case without plasma actuation, and those retrieved in presence of plasma actuation at different supplied voltages, highlighted the performance enhancement due to plasma discharge.

In this study, we systematically analyze the effects of hydrogen enrichment in the well-known PRECCINSTA burner, a partially premixed swirl-stabilized methane/air combustor. Keeping the equivalence ratio and thermal power constant, we vary the hydrogen percentage in the fuel. Successive increments in hydrogen fuel fraction increase the adiabatic flame temperature and also shift the dominant frequencies of acoustic pressure fluctuations to higher values. Under hydrogen enrichment, we observe the emergence of periodicity in the combustor resulting from the interaction between acoustic modes. As a result of the interaction between these modes, the combustor exhibits a variety of dynamical states, including period-1 limit cycle oscillations (LCO), period-2 LCO, chaotic oscillations, and intermittency. The flame and flow behavior is found to be significantly different for each dynamical state. Analyzing the coupled behavior of the acoustic pressure and the heat release rate oscillations during the states of thermoacoustic instability, we report the occurrence of 2:1 frequency-locking during period-2 LCO, where two cycles of acoustic pressure lock with one cycle of the heat release rate. During period-1 LCO, we notice 1:1 frequency-locking, where both acoustic pressure and heat release rate repeat their behavior in every cycle.

Because of the high temperatures involved, undesirable ignition events can happen during gas turbine operation, often necessitating expensive down time and repairs. The ignition events are frequently linked to the lubricant, a flammable mixture of large hydrocarbons with a very low vapor pressure. To understand better the role of the lubricant in such ignition events, increased understanding of the fundamental thermal and oxidation characteristics of such oils is needed. To this end, a suite of different tests has been set up and demonstrated at the TEES Turbomachinery Laboratory at Texas A&M University (TAMU) to study various aspects of lubrication oil breakdown and oxidation at elevated temperatures, mostly those related to their coking and ignition behaviors. Five types of tests have been implemented: ignition delay time measurements using a shock tube; hot surface ignition (HSI); autoignition temperature (AIT) determination; thermal cook-off under controlled heating; and a high-temperature coking experiment. Such tests can be used both for fundamental understanding of how lube oils burn and for comparing the reactivity of various types and grades of oil. Each technique at TAMU is briefly described in this paper as they pertain to gas turbine lube oils, and sample results are presented for a common lubrication oil, Mobil DTE 732. For this oil, the HSI tests produced a lowest temperature without ignition of 510°C, and in shock-tube measurements, lower-temperature ignition kinetics are observed below about 1300 K, even at 1 atm. Typical AIT values for oils have been found to be around 370°C but do vary amongst brands, types, and level of degradation. The measured temperatures for the exothermic and boiling events were measured as 166±2 °C and 277±4 °C using the cook-off rig.

Ever-increasing energy demand, limited non-renewable resources, requirement for increased operational flexibility, and the need for reduction of pollutant emissions are the critical factors that drive the development of next generation fuel flexible gas turbine combustors. The use of hydrogen and hydrogen-rich fuels such as syngas helps in achieving decarbonisation. However, high temperatures and flame speeds associated with hydrogen might increase the NO x emissions. Humidified combustion presents a promising approach for NO x control. Humidification inhibits the formation of NO x and also allows for operating on hydrogen and hydrogen-rich fuels. The challenge in the implementation of this technology is the combustor (burner) design, which must provide a stable combustion process at high hydrogen content and ultra-wet conditions. In the present work, we investigate the flow field and combustion characteristics of a generic triple swirl burner running on humidified and hydrogen enriched methane-air mixtures. The investigated burner consists of three co-axial co-rotating swirling passages: outer radial swirler stage, and two inner concentric axial swirler stages. Reynold’s Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulation approach has been utilized here for flow description within the burner and inside the combustor. We present the flow fields from isothermal and lean pre-mixed methane-air reactive simulations based on the characterization of velocity profiles, streamwise shear layers, temperature fields and NO x emissions. Subsequently, we investigate the effect of combustion on flow fields, and flame stabilization for hydrogen enriched methane-air mixtures as a function of hydrogen content. We also investigate the effect of humidified combustion on methane-hydrogen blends and present comparison of temperature estimations and NO x emissions.

Enabled by national commercialization of massive shale resources, Gas Turbines continue to be the backbone of power generation in the US. With the ever-increasing demand on efficiency, GT combustion sections have evolved to include shorter combustion lengths and multiple axial staging of the fuel, while at the same time operating at ever increasing temperatures. This paper presents the results of very detailed Large Eddy Simulations of one (or two) combustor can(s) for a 7HA GE Gas Turbine Engine over a range of operating parameters. The model of the simulated combustor can(s) includes (include) all the details of the combustor from compressor diffuser to the end of the stationary part of the first stage of the turbine. It includes the geometries of multiple pre-mixers within the combustion can(s) and the complete design features for axial fuel staging. All simulations in this work are performed using the CharLES flow solver developed by Cascade Technologies. CharLES is a suite of massively parallel CFD tools designed specifically for multiphysics LES in high-fidelity engineering applications. Thermo acoustic results from LES were validated first in the physical GE lab and then in full-engine testing. Both the trend as well as the predicted amplitudes for the excited axial dominant combustion mode matched the data produced in the lab and in the engine. The simulations also revealed insight into the ingestion of hot gases by different hardware pieces that may occur when machine operates under medium to high combustion dynamics amplitudes. This insight then informed the subsequent design changes which were made to the existing hardware to mitigate the problems encountered.

To reach ambitious emission goals, the use of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) is a short-term option in current aero engines. The combustion of such fuels can, due to their low soot formation, have an impact on the thermal radiation inside the combustor. This in turn can affect the combustor liner temperatures, which are directly linked to the lifetime of the combustor. To study the impact of SAFs, the authors numerically simulated the flow inside a V2500 aero engine combustor using an OpenFOAM-based solver capable of capturing multi-physics phenomena such as combustion, conjugate heat transfer, thermal radiation and soot formation. The complex cooling system of the V2500 combustor makes the evaluation of the wall temperatures extremely challenging. To achieve results with the resources available, the authors replaced the densely packed pins inside the cooling channel with a boundary condition. This boundary condition was derived from a highly detailed simulation of a section of the cooling system. With this model reduction, the wall temperatures could be evaluated at four operating points. Back-to-back comparisons of the predicted wall temperatures with pictures of deteriorated combustor hardware out of the field operation reveals the plausibility of the numerical results. Finally, this numerical model was extended to include the effects of thermal radiation and soot formation. To predict the combustion of Jet-A, both models were used with settings derived from former validation simulations. The SAF combustion with extremely low sooting level was mimicked by deactivating the soot formation completely. The comparison of the radiation source term reveals — as expected — locally a higher radiation emission in areas where soot is formed in the combustor. As consequence, this leads to higher net radiative heat flux into the combustor liners. However, due to its minor importance in the overall energy balance, this change did not lead to significantly different liner temperatures.

Carbon monoxide (CO) has been identified as one of the regulated pollutants and gas turbine manufacturers target to reduce the CO emission from their gas turbine engines. CO forms primarily when carbonous fuels are not burnt completely, or products of combustion are quenched before completing the combustion. Numerical simulations are effective tools that allow a better understanding of the mechanisms of CO formation in gas turbine engines and are useful in evaluating the effect of different parameters like swirl, fuel atomization, mixing etc. on the overall CO emission for different engine conditions like idle, cruise, approach and take off. In this paper, a thorough assessment of flamelet generated manifold (FGM) combustion model is carried out to predict the qualitative variation and magnitude of CO emission index with the different configurations of a Honeywell test combustor operating with liquid fuel under idle condition, which is the more critical engine condition for CO emission. The different designs of the test combustor are configured in such a way that they yield different levels of CO and hence are ideal to test the accuracy of the combustion model. Large eddy simulation (LES) method is used for capturing the turbulence accurately along with the FGM combustion model that is computationally economical compared to the detailed/reduced chemistry modeling using finite rate combustion model. Liquid fuel spray breakup is modeled using stochastic secondary droplet (SSD) model. Four different configurations of the aviation gas turbine combustor are studied in this work referring to earlier work by Xu et al. [1]. It is shown that the FGM model can predict CO trends accurately. The other global parameters like exit temperature, NOx emissions, pattern factor also show reasonable agreement with the test data. The sensitivity of the CO prediction to the liquid fuel droplet breakup model parameters is also studied in this work. Although the trend of CO variation is captured for different values of breakup parameters, the absolute magnitude of CO emission index differs significantly with the change in the values of breakup parameters suggesting that the spray has a larger impact on the quantitative prediction of CO emission. An accurate prediction of CO trends at idle conditions using FGM model extends the applicability of FGM model to predict different engine operating conditions for different performance criteria accurately.

Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS) has been shown to be an excellent tool for qualitative flow visualization, and more recently, literature has shown that the technique can be expanded to yield quantitative measurements as well. In this study, a BOS setup was built to construct the temperature distribution of a heated turbulent free 12mm diameter jet near the nozzle. A 1080p DSLR camera was used to view a black and white speckled background plane through the heated free jet in question. Comparing images of the background with and without flow present using a cross correlation algorithm gave the apparent displacement of all points on the background viewed through the flow. Once this displacement field was obtained, a ray-tracing algorithm was implemented to reconstruct the refractive index of the center plane of the jet. Then, the Gladstone-Dale and ideal gas relations were combined and used to calculate the temperature of the center plane. Reynolds number, based on the jet diameter, was held constant at 6,000 for all cases, and steady state nozzle temperature was varied from 57°C to 135°C. Reconstructed temperature distributions were validated using K-type thermocouple measurements by allowing the system to reach steady state before acquiring data. Average agreement of 4–6% was observed between thermocouple and BOS measurements for axial locations of at least 30 mm downstream. Due to experimental error, accuracy decreases as axial location moves towards the nozzle, and as nozzle temperature increases. Improvements to the setup are being considered to improve the agreement in low accuracy regions. Further, this technique has the potential to be used to determine the temperatures in open and optically accessible closed reactive flows. Having information about near wall temperature in closed reactive flows will give insight into wall convective heat transfer characterization and will also help benchmark combustion based numerical models in applications such as gas turbines.

The measurement of turbine inlet temperature is challenging because of high temperatures and complicated physical access, but continuous measurement of the turbine inlet temperature is very important for maximizing turbine efficiency and increasing durability. This paper provides in-situ turbine rotor inlet temperature (TRIT) measurements in an 8200 kW operating gas turbine engine. The measurements were obtained using integrated spectral infrared (ISIR) emission from the water vapor of the combustion gases entering the turbine rotor. The method utilizes a sapphire optical fiber to convey the signal from the turbine wall to outside the turbine casing. All components are capable of long-term exposure to the turbine operating conditions. The temperature measurements were obtained at 6 operating conditions between 50% and full load. The TRIT temperature was also determined using more than 20 test cell inputs and Solar Turbine’s commercial test cell engine model. The two temperatures (measured and modeled) were within 11 K (less than 1%) across the load sweep. Uncertainty calculations suggest that the uncertainty of the measurement can be expected to be ±2.9% within a confidence interval of 95%. The method also yields the nozzle guide vane surface temperature which was found to increase monotonically with increasing load.

In recent years, MHPS achieved a NET M501J gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) efficiency in excess of 62% operating at 1,600°C, while maintaining NOx under 25ppm. Taking advantage of our gas turbine combustion design, development and operational experience, retrofits of earlier generation gas turbines have been successfully applied and will be described in this paper. One example of the latest J-Series technologies, a conventional pilot nozzle was changed to a premix type pilot nozzle for low emission. The technology was retrofitted to the existing F-Series gas turbines, which resulted in emission rates of lower than 9ppm NOx(15%O2) while maintaining the same Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT: Average Gas Temperature at the exit of the transition piece). After performing retrofitting design, high pressure rig tests, the field test prior to commercial operation was conducted on January 2019. This paper describes the Ultra-Low NOx combustor design features, retrofit design, high pressure rig test and verification test results of the upgraded M501F gas turbine. In addition, it describes another upgrade of turbine to improve efficiency and of combustion control system to achieve low emissions. Furthermore it describes the trouble-free upgrade of seven (7) units, which was completed by utilizing MHPS integration capabilities, including handling all the design, construction and service work of the main equipment, plant and control systems.