An experimental variant of a commercial swirl burner for industrial gas turbine combustors operating at 3 bar is numerically investigated using high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics models using STAR-CCM+ v11.06. This work presents the computational results of the SGT-100 Dry Low Emission gas turbine provided by Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd. The related experimental study was performed at the DLR Institute of Combustion Technology, Stuttgart, Germany. The objective of this work is to compare the performance of the Flamelet Generated Manifold model, which is the widely accepted combustion model in Gas Turbines with the Complex Chemistry model. In particular this work examines the flame shape and position, pollutant formation predicted by the aforementioned models with Large Eddy Simulations.

Mean and RMS quantities of the flow field, flame temperatures and major species are presented and compared with the experiments. The results show that the predictions are insensitive on the meshing strategy and at the evaluated mesh sizes of ∼10 million and ∼44 million cells. The mean and RMS errors are ∼8% compared to the reported experiments and these differences are within the measurement errors. The results show that the calculated flame positions are in very good agreement with the reported measurements and the typical M-shape flame is reproduced independent of the combustion model. Pollutant formation in the combustor predicted by two combustion models is scrutinised. The predicted NO and CO emissions levels are in agreement with the literature.