Experimental Sensitivity Analysis and the Equivalence of Pulsed Forcing and Feedback Control in Thermoacoustic Systems

Abstract

We examine the shifts in linear decay rates and growth rates, with and without control devices on a simple thermoacoustic system. When the system is stable, we measure the decay rate by pulsing with a loudspeaker. This improves on the experimental techniques developed by Rigas et al. (J. Fluid Mech., 2016, vol. 787, R1 [1]) and Jamieson et al. (Int. J. Spray and Comb. Dyn., accepted, 2016 [2]), to develop a more efficient method of experimental sensitivity analysis to apply in thermoacoustic systems. When the system is unstable, we use feedback control to bring it to a non-oscillating state. We then switch off the feedback control and measure the growth rate. The results suggest that both methods are suitable for use in the experimental sensitivity analysis of thermoacoustic systems. Our experimental set up is automated and we find that we can obtain thousands of decay rates in 1/12 the time compared with the previous work.