Passive Control of the Inlet Acoustic Boundary of a Swirled Burner at High Amplitude Combustion Instabilities

Abstract

Perforated panels placed upstream of the premixing tube of a turbulent swirled burner are investigated as a passive control solution for combustion instabilities. Perforated panels backed by a cavity are widely used as acoustic liners, mostly in the hot gas region of combustion chambers to reduce pure tone noises. This paper focuses on the use of this technology in the fresh reactants zone to control the inlet acoustic reflection coefficient of the burner and to stabilize the combustion. This method is shown to be particularly efficient because high acoustic fluxes issued from the combustion region are concentrated on a small surface area inside the premixer. Theoretical results are used to design two types of perforated plates featuring similar acoustic damping properties when submitted to low amplitude pressure fluctuations (linear regime). Their behaviors nonetheless largely differ when facing large pressure fluctuation levels (nonlinear regime) typical of those encountered during self-sustained combustion oscillations. Conjectures are given to explain these differences. These two plates are then used to clamp thermoacoustic oscillations. Significant damping is only observed for the plate featuring a robust response to increasing sound levels. While developed on a laboratory scale swirled combustor, this method is more general and may be adapted to more practical configurations.