Plasma-Assisted Combustion (PAC) has shown potential in improving the ignition, extinction, and dynamic performance of combustion systems. In this work, Nanosecond Repetitively Pulsed (NRP) spark discharges are applied to extend the lean blow out limit of the SICCA-Spray burner. This laboratory-scale atmospheric test rig is equipped with a swirl spray injector representing in an idealized fashion a single sector of a gas turbine. Three fuels and injection conditions are considered: perfectly premixed methane-air, liquid heptane, and liquid dodecane injected as hollow cone sprays. The optimal electrode position that extends the LBO limit is found to be near the external edge of the outer recirculation zone (ORZ). Spectroscopic measurements show that the NRP sparks produce atomic species and heat the gas above the adiabatic flame temperature. High-speed chemiluminescence images of blow out sequences indicate that the flame evolves similarly for all three fuels from "M" or "V" shapes prevailing at φ = 0.9 to a configuration where chemical conversion also takes place in the ORZ at φ = 0.63. A low frequency combustion oscillation arises near the LBO limit (φ = 0.57). Spray flames blow out at this point, while the plasma-assisted ones continue to burn. It is shown that PAC provides a significant improvement of the extinction performance, in particular when operating with liquid fuel spray injection.
Combustion instability in annular combustors of jet engines is a recurring issue. In the present study, the characteristics of instabilities for different fuels are investigated by combining the instability maps obtained in a laboratory-scale annular combustor equipped with multiple swirling spray injectors (MICCA-Spray) and flame describing functions (FDFs) from a single sector configuration (SICCA-Spray). Two types of liquid fuels are injected as hollow cone sprays: heptane, which is fairly volatile, and dodecane, which is less volatile. Experiments are also conducted with gaseous propane, premixed with air, which serves as a reference. An instability map is systematically drawn by varying the global equivalence ratio and thermal power. The data indicate that the amplitude and frequency of instabilities depend, for the same operating point, on the fuel injection conditions and fuel type. Overall trends show that premixed propane is unstable in a broad operating domain. Injection of liquid fuels induce changes in flame time lag that modify the unstable regions. For heptane, the instability map is closer to the propane reference map, whereas dodecane exhibits wider stable regions. An attempt is made to understand these features by examining the FDF, which gives the ratio of relative fluctuations in heat release rate to the relative fluctuations in velocity. The FDFs measured in a single sector configuration give access to gain and phase information that can be used to determine unstable bands and calculate an instability index guiding the interpretation of the differences in instabilities of the three fuels.
The quality of liquid fuel spray injection determines to a large extent the steady state performance and dynamics of gas turbine and aero-engine combustors. The present investigation is focused on the detailed characterization of the liquid fuel spray in a single sector test rig targeted at aero-engine applications. The liquid fuel (heptane) is injected in a hollow cone spray pattern by a simplex atomizer and the injector comprises a radial swirler. Two features of the droplet distribution that are less commonly found in the technical literature are identified. First, the distributions of mean droplet diameters exhibit non-axisymmetric patterns, a lack of symmetry that is investigated for three types of swirlers differing by their swirl number and/or head loss. Second, it is found that the size-conditioned velocity distributions feature a single wide peak for small droplets and become bimodal for the largest droplets, with a first peak at low velocities, and a second one at higher velocities. The spray behavior analysis is complemented by making use of Large Eddy Simulations with Lagrangian Particle Tracking. Droplet injection is achieved with a model in which the initial size and velocity distributions are specified from experimental data in the atomizer near field. The initial spray interacts with the lateral injector surface and requires a droplet-wall interaction model accounting for the existence of a liquid film. Simulations do not retrieve the lack of rotational symmetry that is found experimentally indicating that this is not linked to the nature of the swirling flow. This is also consistent with further experiments with a different atomizer confirming that this is due to imperfections in the initial atomizer geometry. Another result is that certain swirler designs appear to be more robust to these atomizer imperfections. Simulations accounting for the liquid film yield a bimodal distribution for the droplets’ axial velocity distribution which would not be obtained without this model indicating that it is important to represent the droplet-wall interaction, a feature that is not commonly found in the literature.
Experiments are carried out on a laboratory-scale annular combustor with liquid heptane to examine the effects of swirlers on azimuthal instabilities. Five types of swirlers varying in swirl numbers and pressure drops are considered. These swirlers can be broadly categorized into two groups, lower-swirl, and higher-swirl groups, based on their swirl numbers. Results reveal that none of the swirlers in the lower-swirl category exhibit instability in the operating region considered, whereas the higher-swirl units feature strong azimuthal instabilities. Among the higher-swirl group, a higher pressure drop swirler is associated with a broader instability map. This shows that the transition to instability mainly depends on the swirl number through its effect on flame structure and pressure drop adds to further variations. An attempt is made to interpret the occurrence of instabilities by making use of flame describing functions (FDFs) measured in a single-injector combustor. The observed instability behavior is tentatively interpreted using an instability analysis in which the injector and upstream plenum are represented by an impedance that shifts the instability band. The unstable behavior is then linked to the relative position of the FDF phase with respect to the instability band in the expected azimuthal mode frequency range. The phase and gain of the FDF notably depend on the swirl number, and it is possible to distinguish, for the present configuration, a category of low swirl number injectors inducing stable operation and another category of high swirl number units leading to oscillations.
The quality of liquid fuel spray injection determines to a large extent the performance of aeroengine combustors. The present investigation focuses on the detailed characterization of the liquid fuel spray in a test rig targeted at aeroengine applications. The liquid fuel is injected as a hollow cone by a simplex atomizer and the injector comprises a radial swirler. Two features of the droplet distribution are less commonly found. First, the distributions of droplet diameters exhibit nonaxisymmetric patterns, which are investigated for three types of swirlers. Second, it is found that the size-conditioned velocity distributions feature a single wide peak for small droplets and become bimodal for the largest droplets, with a first peak at low velocities, and a second one at higher velocities. The analysis is complemented with Large Eddy Simulations and Lagrangian Particle Tracking. The spray interacts with the lateral injector surface and requires a droplet-wall interaction model for the liquid film. Simulations do not retrieve the lack of rotational symmetry that is found experimentally indicating that this is not linked to the nature of the swirling flow. This is also consistent with further experiments with a different atomizer confirming that this is due to imperfections in the atomizer geometry. Another result is that certain swirler designs are more robust to atomizer imperfections. Simulations accounting for the liquid film yield a bimodal distribution for the droplets' axial velocity distribution which is not obtained without this model indicating that it is important to represent the droplet-wall interaction.
Recent investigations of combustion instabilities in annular systems indicate that considerable insight may be gained by using information gathered in single-sector experiments. Such experiments are, for example, employed to measure flame describing functions (FDFs), which represent the flame response to incident perturbations. These data may be used in combination with low-order models to interpret instabilities in multiple injector annular systems. It is known, however, that the structure and dynamical behavior of an isolated flame do not necessarily coincide with those of a flame placed in an annular environment with neighboring side flames. It is then worth analyzing effects that may be induced by the difference in lateral boundary conditions and specifically examining the extent to which the FDF data from single-segment experiments portrays the dynamical response of the flame in the annular environment. These issues are investigated with a new setup, named TICCA-Spray, that comprises a linear arrangement of three injectors. The central flame is surrounded by two identical side flames in a rectangular geometry with key dimensions, side-wall separation, and spacing between injectors identical to those of the annular system MICCA-Spray. The describing function of the central flame is determined with techniques recently developed in single sector experiments (SICCA-Spray). The FDFs obtained in the two configurations are compared for two swirler types having different swirl numbers and pressure drops. The effect of the swirl direction of the neighboring injectors is also explored by operating with co- and counter-swirl combinations. Differences between FDFs determined in the two test facilities, sometimes modest and in other cases less negligible, are found to depend on the flames’ spatial extension and interactions. The general inference is that the FDFs measured in a single-injector combustor are better suited if the flame-wall interaction is weak, and provided that the area is equivalent to that of a single sector of an annular combustor. Nonetheless, using a multi-injector system would be more appropriate for a more precise FDF determination.
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