The German Aerospace Centre (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is building up its resources for investigating environment-friendly gas turbines and to this end has teamed up with industrial partners Alstom and Rolls-Royce.
Recently, the three partners attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a modern, globally unique combustor test facility. This signals the start of some 47 million euros ($63.5 million) of investment in the expansion of the infrastructure at DLR’s Cologne site. The aim of this collaboration is to further increase the efficiency of combustors and at the same time to significantly reduce exhaust gas and noise emissions from gas turbines. Starting in mid-2014, the new high-pressure combustor test facility (Hochdruckbrennkammerprüfstand 5; HBK5) will be used to perform combustor tests that contribute towards the development of future generations of aircraft engines and power generation turbines.
Whether used in an aircraft or a power plant, the combustor is the heart of a gas turbine. It is here that the energy in the fuel is released. To increase the efficiency of future gas turbines, researchers need to further increase combustion temperatures without constraining the operating range or generating unwanted pressure fluctuations in the process. This calls for experimental testing under realistic conditions, long before any new turbines are introduced to the market. In connection with this, alternative fuels from non-fossil raw materials are becoming increasingly important.
HBK5 will give engineers in the Combustion Chamber Test Department of the DLR Institute of Propulsion Technology access to a test facility that is globally unique. The test facility will be unusual in having a thermal output of 125 megawatts and will be unique in that the researchers will be able to use a wide range of fuels, from conventional ones through to special fuels for aviation, in test operation. Similarly, HBK5 will be the best in the world with regard to cooling capability and compressed air supply.
The facility is due to be handed over to the researchers for test operations by mid-2014. One of the declared goals of the collaboration between DLR, as a research centre and the industrial partners, is to convert research results into rapid developments and hence into products available on the market.
