| Abstract: | Swirl is used extensively in gas turbine combustors, principally as a means of controlling flame size, shape, stability and combustion intensity. Rapid progress has been made in recent years in the development of mathematical models of combustor swirl flows which simulate the processes of turbulence, combustion, fuel droplet sprays, radiation and pollutant formation, and solve the resulting equations via a computational procedure, which seeks an optimum path to the solution of the governing set of several simultaneous nonlinear partial differential equations. This paper looks at recent advances in the modeling of combustor swirl flows, its aim being to review the difficulties, discuss developments, demonstrate that useful predictions are already being made, and indicate in what areas further research may be useful. |
