Premixed Flame Dynamics in Response to Two-Dimensional Acoustic Forcing

Abstract

ABSTRACTThermoacoustic instability in annular combustors involves feedback interaction between individual (acoustically compact) flames and – predominantly – azimuthal acoustic modes of the annular combustion chamber. During such an interaction, the flames experience acoustic pressure fluctuations in the combustor and transverse acoustic velocity fluctuations simultaneously. To investigate the dynamics of premixed swirl flames under the influence of transverse acoustics, experiments were performed on a single-burner atmospheric combustion rig with controlled simultaneous axial and transverse acoustic forcing, where the axial acoustics simulates the effect of acoustic pressure fluctuations in the combustor. In this paper, we present results on the descriptive analysis of spatially resolved flame surface fluctuations, acquired via OH-PLIF (OH* planar laser-induced florescence) diagnostics of the forced flame and establish the role of the interaction among coherent structures generated by axial and transverse velocity components in generating global flame response changes with respect to the phase difference between axial and transverse acoustic forcing as reported recently (Saurabh and Paschereit, Combustion Flame 182, 2017).