Early warnings of tipping in a non-autonomous turbulent reactive flow system: Efficacy, reliability, and warning times

Abstract

Real-world complex systems such as the earth’s climate, ecosystems, stock markets, and combustion engines are prone to dynamical transitions from one state to another, with catastrophic consequences. State variables of such systems often exhibit aperiodic fluctuations, either chaotic or stochastic in nature. Often, the parameters describing a system vary with time, showing time dependency. Constrained by these effects, it becomes difficult to be warned of an impending critical transition, as such effects contaminate the precursory signals of the transition. Therefore, a need for efficient and reliable early-warning signals (EWSs) in such complex systems is in pressing demand. Motivated by this fact, in the present work, we analyze various EWSs in the context of a non-autonomous turbulent thermoacoustic system. In particular, we investigate the efficacy of different EWS in forecasting the onset of thermoacoustic instability (TAI) and their reliability with respect to the rate of change of the control parameter. This is the first experimental study of tipping points in a non-autonomous turbulent thermoacoustic system. We consider the Reynolds number (Re) as the control parameter, which is varied linearly with time at finite rates. The considered EWSs are derived from critical slowing down, spectral properties, and fractal characteristics of the system variables. The state of TAI is associated with large amplitude acoustic pressure oscillations that could lead thermoacoustic systems to break down. We consider acoustic pressure fluctuations as a potential system variable to perform the analysis. Our analysis shows that irrespective of the rate of variation of the control parameter, the Hurst exponent and variance of autocorrelation coefficients warn of an impending transition well in advance and are more reliable than other EWS measures. Additionally, we show the variation in the warning time to an impending TAI with rates of change of the control parameter. We also investigate the variation in amplitudes of the most significant modes of acoustic pressure oscillations with the Hurst exponent. Such variations lead to scaling laws that could be significant in prediction and devising control actions to mitigate TAI.