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Industrial gas turbines commonly use lean premixed swirl stabilized combustors that are prone to thermo-acoustic instabilities. Combustor testing involves several steps ranging from atmospheric to high-pressure conditions. An open outlet boundary condition is maintained for atmospheric tests commonly, whereas high-pressure testing involves complex exit boundary conditions, which change the reflection coefficient and can affect the nature of instability. Current work aims at studying how the change in outlet boundary affects the nature of instability due to changes in the exit reflection coefficient and acoustic mode shape inside the combustor. A laboratory-scale industrial swirl burner that uses partially premixed methane and air at atmospheric conditions is analyzed for this purpose. A constant area contraction ratio of 6.5:1 is maintained at the exit of the combustor while varying the inlet Reynolds number at a constant global equivalence ratio. Flame dynamics based on conditional phase averaged OH* chemiluminescence images and spatial Rayleigh index maps were used to compare different flow rate and exit boundary cases. The outlet contraction affects both the frequency and amplitude of the dominant thermoacoustic mode. The orifice plate at the exit reduces the outlet reflection coefficient leading to a change in acoustic mode shape inside the combustor. Overall, the instability amplitude is reduced considerably for cases with an orifice plates at the exit boundary compared to open exit boundary cases. The results show the importance of defining outlet boundary conditions as a parameter in combustion instability studies. Care should be taken while comparing and interpreting results from different facilities where outlet boundary condition is different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of hydrodynamics resulting in the mixed-mode oscillations (MMO) of unsteady pressure in a backward facing step combustor with partially premixed flame is investigated using time-resolved particle image velocimetry and CH* chemiluminescence imaging. This mode of pressure oscillations comprises switching between high-amplitude oscillations dictated by acoustic mode and/vortex mode and low-amplitude oscillations. The high-amplitude oscillations are marked by intense flow and flame modulation, while the low-amplitude oscillations are accompanied by small-scale structures on the shear layer, that are sedate in driving the heat release oscillations. The small-scales override on the elongated flame that resides in the recirculation zone of the step. The key aspect of the present work is in identifying the transitional events that result in the decay/ onset of high-amplitudes. This is achieved by tracking vortex cores at each instant during the transition. The small-scale shear layer structures, that are present during low-amplitude events merge as they convect with the flow. The identified vortex cores on the shear layer and in the recirculation zone reduce in their multiplicity as the merger progresses. This subsequently results in the genesis of a large-scale structure that modulates the flame coherently, thereby triggering high-amplitude oscillations. This is corroborated with identifying the presence of a single vortex core resulting in high amplitude events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flame-acoustic interactions are witnessed in the context of combustion instability in gas turbine combustors and other propulsion devices, such as rockets, besides confined combustion systems in general, such as furnaces and heaters. The confinement causes acoustic standing wave modes that interact with the flame to cause fluctuations in all quantities to grow in amplitude. This review categorizes the different canonical flame-holding geometries that mostly involve flow recirculation zones for flame stabilization, which are inherently unstable and feed into the flame-acoustic interaction cycle. The receptivity of the nonreacting shear layer to prevalent acoustic forcing in terms of development of coherent structures and instability of different hydrodynamic modes in the recirculation are detailed. The case of reacting flow instabilities involves several mechanisms of flame-acoustic coupling, such as vortex combustion; vortex-wall interactions; vortex-vortex interactions; flame area fluctuations and equivalence ratio, vorticity, and entropy fluctuations; bifurcations of the combustor dynamics; and its Strouhal scaling. In some instances, flame blowout dynamics as well as flashback are coupled with the prevalent acoustic oscillations. Some of these aspects have been well diagnosed in the recent literature, notably using planar laser-induced fluorescence for flame marking and particle image velocimetry to characterize the flow in a time-resolved manner. Reduced order models based on empirically determined flame transfer functions and predictive tools for onset of combustion instability based on time series analysis, either from a nonlinear dynamical viewpoint or a data-driven approach, are in current vogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]