Effect of compressor unsteady wakes on a gas turbine combustor flow

In gas turbines, combustor inlets are characterized by significant levels of unsteady circumferential distortion due to compressor wakes and secondary flows, together with additional radial nonuniformity induced by the adverse pressure gradients in the prediffuser. This can cause nonuniform velocity distributions across the fuel injector, although the exact interaction mechanism, and the effects it has on the downstream air–fuel mixing, is not fully understood. This paper investigates the flow in an a single sector of a fully featured isothermal rig comprising of compression and combustion systems, exploiting the synchronous coupling of a compressible unsteady RANS simulation with a low-Mach large eddy simulation (LES). Validation against five-hole probe measurements shows that the coupled approach can correctly predict distortion onset and development, with no solution discontinuity at the coupling interface, and is able to preserve unsteady information. The coupled prediction is then compared against a standalone combustor simulation carried out using a circumferentially uniform inlet profile, showing that the additional turbulence from the wakes interacts with the injector, reducing the coherence of the precessing vortex core (PVC) and potentially affecting the air–fuel mixing characteristics.