On the Use of Helmholtz Resonators for Damping Acoustic Pulsations in Industrial Gas Turbines

Abstract

In modern gas turbines operating with premix combustion flames, the suppression of pressure pulsations is an important task related to the quality of the combustion process and to the structural integrity of engines. High pressure pulsations may occur when the resonance frequencies of the system are excited by heat release fluctuations independent of the acoustic field (“loudspeaker” behavior of the flame). Heat release fluctuations are also generated by acoustic fluctuations in the premixed stream. The feedback mechanism inherent in such processes (“amplifier” behavior of the flame) may lead to combustion instabilities, the amplitude of pulsations being limited only by nonlinearities. In this work, the application of Helmholtz resonators for damping low-frequency pulsations in gas turbine combustion chambers is discussed. We present a nonlinear model for predicting the acoustic response of resonators including the effect of purging air. Atmospheric experiments are used to validate the model, which is employed to design a resonator arrangement for damping low-frequency pulsations in an ALSTOM GT11N2 gas turbine. The predicted damper impedances are used as the boundary condition in the three-dimensional analysis of the combustion chamber. The suggested arrangement leads to a significant extension of the low-pulsation operating regime of the engine.