In many continuous combustion processes, such as those found in aeroengines or gas turbines, the flame is stabilized by a swirling flow formed by aerodynamic swirlers. The dynamics of such swirling flames is of technical and fundamental interest. This article reviews progress in this field and begins with a discussion of the swirl number, a parameter that plays a central role in the definition of the flow structure and its response to incoming disturbances. Interaction between the swirler response and incoming acoustic perturbations generates a vorticity wave convected by the flow, which is accompanied by azimuthal velocity fluctuations. Axial and azimuthal velocities in turn define the flame response in terms of heat release rate fluctuations. The nonlinear response of swirling flames to incoming disturbances is conveniently represented with a flame describing function (FDF), in other words, with a family of transfer functions depending on frequency and incident axial velocity amplitudes. The FDF, however, does not reflect all possible nonlinear interactions in swirling flows. This aspect is illustrated with experimental data and some theoretical arguments in the last part of this article, which concerns the interaction of incident acoustic disturbances with the precessing vortex core, giving rise to nonlinear fluctuations at the frequency difference.

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Annular combustors may give rise to various types of combustion instabilities. Some of the resulting oscillations coupled by transverse acoustic modes are commonly observed in practice and their suppression or reduction is an important issue which needs to be considered. The present study is carried out in a system comprising an annular plenum feeding 16 swirling injectors confined by two cylindrical quartz tubes opened to the atmosphere. Calculations based on a Helmholtz solver provide a suitable estimate of frequencies observed experimentally and reveal the modal structure corresponding to the longitudinal and transverse oscillations. High speed images obtained under reactive conditions are then processed to extract the structure of heat release rate perturbations and match this structure with that of the coupling acoustic mode. It is found that the transverse instability is coupled by a first azimuthal mode which is characterized by a time varying spin ratio. This index gives the respective levels of rotating components in the azimuthal mode. Another instability arising at a lower frequency is coupled by a longitudinal acoustic mode giving rise to high-amplitude oscillations in heat release rate in which most of the flames (but not all) are synchronized and in phase with the pressure perturbation.

Oscillations in fully annular systems coupled by azimuthal modes are often observed in gas turbine combustors but not well documented. One objective of the present study is to characterize this type of oscillation in a laboratory scale system, allowing detailed pressure measurements and high speed visualization of the flame motion. The experiment is designed to allow detailed investigations of this process at a stable limit cycle and for an extended period of time. Experiments reported in the present article are carried out in the MICCA facility which was used in our previous work to analyze instabilities arising when the chamber backplane was equipped with multiple swirling injectors (Bourgouin et al., 2013, “Self-Sustained Instabilities in an Annular Combustor Coupled by Azimuthal Acoustic Modes,” ASME Paper No. GT2013-95010). In the present study, these units are replaced by a set of matrix injectors. The annular plenum feeds 16 such devices confined by two cylindrical quartz tubes open to the atmosphere. The multiple flames formed by the matrix injectors are laminar and have a well documented describing function. This constitutes an ideal configuration allowing systematic investigations of thermo-acoustic oscillations coupled by longitudinal or azimuthal modes while avoiding complexities inherent to swirling turbulent flames studied previously. Optical access to the chamber allows high speed imaging of light emission from the flames providing instantaneous flame patterns and indications on the heat release rate fluctuations. Eight waveguide microphones record the pressure signal at the combustor injection plane and in the plenum. Among the unstable modes observed in this setup, this analysis focuses on situations where the system features a spinning azimuthal mode. This mode is observed at a frequency which is close to that associated with the 1A mode of the plenum. A theoretical analysis is then carried out to interpret the angular shift between the nodal lines in the plenum and chamber, and the measured flame describing function (FDF) is used to quantify this shift and determine the linear growth rate.

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