Impact of wall heat transfer in Large Eddy Simulation of flame dynamics in a swirled combustion chamber

Abstract

Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is a fundamental research tool to study gas turbines and aero-engine combustors. In LES, although rarely addressed systematically, it is known that thermal boundary conditions control the heat transfer between the flow and the combustor walls. This work presents a study on the impact of thermal wall boundary conditions for the PRECCINSTA test bench, operated by the German Space Agency (DLR). Two approaches are tested: Heat Resistances Tuning (HRT), where a local resistance is tuned using experimental temperature data, and full Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT), where the chamber wall-temperature is solved and coupled to the flow computation. Results reveal that the HRT method captures the mean flame correctly but the predicted flame becomes unstable and responds to a thermoacoustic oscillation which is not observed experimentally. On the contrary, using CHT, the flame is correctly predicted and stable as in the experiments. Finally, to understand the differences between the HRT and the CHT simulations, Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) analysis is performed showing that the correct response of the flame branches to the pressure oscillations is recovered only in the CHT simulations for which thermoacoustically stable operations are retrieved.