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Intermittency route to thermoacoustic instability in turbulent combustors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2014

Vineeth Nair ,
Gireeshkumaran Thampi  and
R. I. Sujith
Vineeth Nair*
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India
Gireeshkumaran Thampi
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India
R. I. Sujith
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India
*
†Email address for correspondence: [email protected]
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Abstract

The dynamic transition from combustion noise to combustion instability was investigated experimentally in two laboratory-scale turbulent combustors (namely, swirl-stabilized and bluff-body-stabilized backward-facing-step combustors) by systematically varying the flow Reynolds number. We observe that the onset of combustion-driven oscillations is always presaged by intermittent bursts of high-amplitude periodic oscillations that appear in a near-random fashion amidst regions of aperiodic low-amplitude fluctuations. These excursions to periodic oscillations last longer in time as operating conditions approach instability and finally the system transitions completely into periodic oscillations. A continuous measure to quantify this bifurcation in dynamics can be obtained by defining an order parameter as the probability of the signal amplitude exceeding a predefined threshold. A hysteresis zone was observed in the bluff-body-stabilized configuration that was absent in the swirl-stabilized configuration. The recurrence properties of the dynamics of intermittent burst oscillations were quantified using recurrence plots and the distribution of the aperiodic phases was examined. From the statistics of these aperiodic phases, robust early-warning signals of an impending combustion instability may be obtained.

JFM classification

Turbulent Flows: Intermittency Reacting Flows: Turbulent reacting flows
Type
Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 756 , 10 October 2014 , pp. 470 - 487
Copyright
© 2014 Cambridge University Press 

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