Acoustic Measurements of Perforated Liners in Hot and Pressurized Flow

Abstract

Thermo-acoustic instabilities in gas turbine combustors can prevent the implementation of modern combustion concepts, which are essential for higher efficiency and lower emissions. Perforated combustor liners, especially in combination with a bias flow through the liner, are able to suppress the instabilities by increasing the acoustic losses of the system. Some insight into the parameter dependencies of the acoustic absorption has been gained by means of atmospheric testing at ambient temperature. The next step towards realistic testing conditions is taking into account high temperature and high pressure, which increases the effort of the experimental tests and the complexity of their analysis significantly. Tests in a real combustor can serve as a quality check of a given liner design, but are not appropriate for parameter studies. So far, numerical models accurate enough to enable the design of hot stream liners are simply not available, so that the experimental investigation of the liner’s dependency on temperature and pressure is essential for the transfer of laboratory scale results to a real engine application. A new test rig has been designed to overcome these problems. The Hot Acoustic Test rig (HAT) enables the study of the influence of pressure and temperature on the damping performance in an acoustically well defined environment, although the high temperature and high pressure conditions are challenging in terms of accurate acoustic measurements. This paper introduces the Hot Acoustic Test rig with its features and limitations and shows first examples of test results. The focus lies on the hardware, instrumentation, and analysis techniques that are necessary to obtain high quality acoustic data in hot and pressurized flow environments.