Presented in this paper is a novel gas turbine combustor: EZEE® based upon the FLOX® combustion technology. The specific feature of this combustor is the ability to modulate the power density PA for natural gas (NG) combustion on a high thermal power level between PA = 13.3 MW/m2/bar in the main load and PA = 7.9 MW/m2/bar in the part load operation. The operational range for the global air to fuel excess ratio λ is between λ = 1.6 and λ = 2.7 corresponding to adiabatic flame temperatures between Tad ≈ 2000 K and 1500 K, respectively. The air preheating temperature is 673 K and the pressure level is 8 bar. The inspected operational range satisfies the demands of modern gas turbine combustors.
The idea of EZEE® is to manipulate the flame position by radial staging of two independent fuel supplies in order to prevent flame extinction with increasing λ. The combustor is developed with the aid of computational tools and accordingly manufactured and experimentally investigated at the DLR test facilities. It is demonstrated that the combustion is complete and stable and that the pollutant emission is low. Presented are first results of our investigations that show the usefulness and the potential of the concept. However, it is also shown that additional fine-tuning is still necessary to further reduce the pollutant emissions.