Noise sources of an unconfined and a confined swirl burner

Abstract

The sound sources of an unconfined and a confined swirl burner are investigated by a two-step approach. The Reynolds number based on the injector diameter downstream of the swirler is ReD = 8800 and the swirl number is S = 0.73. First, the conservation equations of a compressible fluid are solved to determine the flow field under reacting and non-reacting conditions. The solution determines the mean flow field and the source terms of the acoustic perturbation equations (APE). The contributions of the various sound sources are analyzed by solving the acoustic perturbation equations (APE) in a computational aeroacoustics (CAA) simulation for each of the source terms. For the unconfined swirl burner, the precessing vortex core (PVC) of the swirl flow is a dominant sound source in non-reacting flow, whereas in reacting flow the unsteady heat release dominates the sound field. This changes when the burner is confined. A self-excited instability occurs at the quarter-wave mode of the burner and further sources, i.e., the momentum source due to fluctuations of the pressure at the flame front and the energy source due to velocity fluctuations at the flame front, become important to accurately predict the sound pressure amplitude of the limit cycle.