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Abstract Micro-mixing combustion is a promising technology in the field of gas turbine combustion because of its safeness against autoignition and flashback while having NOx emissions near premixed levels. This technology is especially well suited for the combustion of hydrogen because of its high reactivity. Because of the potential safety and low NOx emissions of micro-mixing combustion, there is the desire to use this technology with a larger fuel spectrum. However, using micro-mixing technologies, stable combustion is limited to reactive fuels such as hydrogen or high hydrogen fuel blends. Our previous work demonstrated excellent combustion stability with high inlet temperatures up to 1000K with hydrogen, propane, natural gas or Jet fuel A1 as fuels. However, using propane as fuel, stable combustion was limited to inlet temperatures higher than 600K. In this paper, the impact of preheating the fuel prior to its injection on the combustion stability is assessed using propane as fuel because of its stability limitation. For micro-mixing injector configuration discussed in this publication, preheating fuel prior its injection allowed to decrease dynamic instability magnitude under 3 dB for most of the unstable data points (Sound pressure level variation at instability dominant frequency). Those stability gains were obtained while achieving similar levels of NOx emissions. Thermoacoustic instabilities were then linked to observed flame positions.
Bellavance et al. (Mon,) studied this question.