We investigate the scale invariance of combustion noise generated from turbulent reacting flows in a confined environment using complex networks. The time series data of unsteady pressure, which is the indicative of spatiotemporal changes happening in the combustor, is converted into complex networks using the visibility algorithm. We show that the complex networks obtained from the low-amplitude, aperiodic pressure fluctuations during combustion noise have scale-free structure. The power-law distributions of connections in the scale-free network are related to the scale invariance of combustion noise. We also show that the scale-free feature of combustion noise disappears and order emerges in the complex network topology during the transition from combustion noise to combustion instability. The use of complex networks enables us to formalize the identification of the pattern (i.e. scale-free to order) during the transition from combustion noise to thermoacoustic instability as a structural change in topology of the network. © 2015 Cambridge University Press.

R. I. Sujith

Department of Aerospace Engineering

Acoustic noise

combustion

Electric network topology

Thermoacoustics

Topology

Combustion instabilities

Pattern formation

Power law distribution

Pressure fluctuation

SPATIO-TEMPORAL CHANGES

Thermoacoustic instability

Turbulent reacting flows

wave-turbulence interaction

Complex networks

Algorithm

FLOW PATTERN

spatiotemporal analysis

Turbulent flow

Unsteady flow

Wave-structure interaction

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Journal of Fluid Mechanics

In turbulent combustors, the transition from stable combustion (i.e. combustion noise) to thermoacoustic instability occurs via intermittency. During stable combustion, the acoustic power production happens in a spatially incoherent manner. In contrast, during thermoacoustic instability, the acoustic power production happens in a spatially coherent manner. In the present study, we investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of acoustic power sources during the intermittency route to thermoacoustic instability using complex network theory. To that end, we perform simultaneous acoustic pressure measurement, high-speed chemiluminescence imaging and particle image velocimetry in a backward-facing step combustor with a bluff body stabilized flame at different equivalence ratios. We examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of acoustic power sources by constructing time-varying spatial networks during the different dynamical states of combustor operation. We show that as the turbulent combustor transits from combustion noise to thermoacoustic instability via intermittency, small fragments of acoustic power sources, observed during combustion noise, nucleate, coalesce and grow in size to form large clusters at the onset of thermoacoustic instability. This nucleation, coalescence and growth of small clusters of acoustic power sources occurs during the growth of pressure oscillations during intermittency. In contrast, during the decay of pressure oscillations during intermittency, these large clusters of acoustic power sources disintegrate into small ones. We use network measures such as the link density, the number of components and the size of the largest component to quantify the spatiotemporal dynamics of acoustic power sources as the turbulent combustor transits from combustion noise to thermoacoustic instability via intermittency. © 2019 Cambridge University Press.

Fulltext

On the emergence of large clusters of acoustic power sources at the onset of thermoacoustic instability in a turbulent combustor

Thermoacoustic instability is a result of the positive feedback between the acoustic pressure and the unsteady heat release rate fluctuations in a combustor. We apply the framework of the synchronization theory to study the coupled behavior of these oscillations during the transition to thermoacoustic instability in a turbulent bluff-body stabilized gas-fired combustor. Furthermore, we characterize this complex behavior using recurrence plots and recurrence networks. We mainly found that the correlation of probability of recurrence (C P R), the joint probability of recurrence (J P R), the determinism (D E T), and the recurrence rate (R R) of the joint recurrence matrix aid in detecting the synchronization transitions in this thermoacoustic system. We noticed that C P R and D E T can uncover the occurrence of phase synchronization state, whereas J P R and R R can be used as indices to identify the occurrence of generalized synchronization (GS) state in the system. We applied measures derived from joint and cross recurrence networks and observed that the joint recurrence network measures, transitivity ratio, and joint transitivity are useful to detect GS. Furthermore, we use the directional property of the network measure, namely, cross transitivity to analyze the type of coupling existing between the acoustic field (p ′) and the heat release rate (q ′) fluctuations. We discover a possible asymmetric bidirectional coupling between q ′ and p ′, wherein q ′ is observed to exert a stronger influence on p ′ than vice versa. © 2018 Author(s).

Chaos

Coupled interaction between unsteady flame dynamics and acoustic field in a turbulent combustor

We use complex network theory to investigate the dynamical transition from stable operation to thermoacoustic instability via intermittency in a turbulent combustor with a bluff body stabilized flame. A spatial network is constructed, representing each of these three dynamical regimes of combustor operation, based on the correlation between time series of local velocity obtained from particle image velocimetry. Network centrality measures enable us to identify critical regions of the flow field during combustion noise, intermittency, and thermoacoustic instability. We find that during combustion noise, the bluff body wake turns out to be the critical region that determines the dynamics of the combustor. As the turbulent combustor transitions to thermoacoustic instability, during intermittency, the wake of the bluff body loses its significance in determining the flow dynamics and the region on top of the bluff body emerges as the most critical region in determining the flow dynamics during thermoacoustic instability. The knowledge about this critical region of the reactive flow field can help us devise optimal control strategies to evade thermoacoustic instability. © 2018 Author(s).

On the emergence of critical regions at the onset of thermoacoustic instability in a turbulent combustor

In this paper, a generalized description of the complex topology of turbulent premixed flames stabilized in a model gas turbine combustor is obtained using network analysis. Networks are created using the visibility algorithm applied to points on the flame edge obtained from Hydroxyl radical (OH)-Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence images of turbulent premixed flames. The network structure thus obtained showed the emergence of a few massively connected nodes which were found to represent the folded regions of the flame front. These nodes, which are called the hubs of the network, are vital for determining the overall structure of the flame front. Degree distribution of the formulated networks is used to characterize the flame-turbulence interaction inherent in the system. Turbulent flame front networks were found to be rigid enough to be unaffected by random perturbations but highly vulnerable towards coordinated removal of hubs or folds. These findings could serve as the first network-analytic approach to characterize turbulenceflame interaction dynamics with the use of a flourishing network theory, which enhances ongoing works based on vortex dynamics, hydrodynamic stability, and thermo-acoustic instability. Published by AIP Publishing.

Network structure of turbulent premixed flames

Flame-acoustic interactions are witnessed in the context of combustion instability in gas turbine combustors and other propulsion devices, such as rockets, besides confined combustion systems in general, such as furnaces and heaters. The confinement causes acoustic standing wave modes that interact with the flame to cause fluctuations in all quantities to grow in amplitude. This review categorizes the different canonical flame-holding geometries that mostly involve flow recirculation zones for flame stabilization, which are inherently unstable and feed into the flame-acoustic interaction cycle. The receptivity of the nonreacting shear layer to prevalent acoustic forcing in terms of development of coherent structures and instability of different hydrodynamic modes in the recirculation are detailed. The case of reacting flow instabilities involves several mechanisms of flame-acoustic coupling, such as vortex combustion; vortex-wall interactions; vortex-vortex interactions; flame area fluctuations and equivalence ratio, vorticity, and entropy fluctuations; bifurcations of the combustor dynamics; and its Strouhal scaling. In some instances, flame blowout dynamics as well as flashback are coupled with the prevalent acoustic oscillations. Some of these aspects have been well diagnosed in the recent literature, notably using planar laser-induced fluorescence for flame marking and particle image velocimetry to characterize the flow in a time-resolved manner. Reduced order models based on empirically determined flame transfer functions and predictive tools for onset of combustion instability based on time series analysis, either from a nonlinear dynamical viewpoint or a data-driven approach, are in current vogue. © 2017 Taylor & Francis.

Combustion Science and Technology

Dynamics and Diagnostics of Flame-Acoustic Interactions

Recently, M. Murugesan and R. I. Sujith ("Combustion Noise is Scale-Free: Transition from Scale-Free to Order at the Onset of Thermoacoustic Instability," Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 32, June 2015, pp. 225-245) showed that the transition from combustion noise to thermoacoustic instability can be represented as a change from a scale-free to a regular structure in the topology of complex networks. These topological changes of the complex networks during this transition can be quantified by calculating the network properties. In this paper, the variation of network properties, namely, clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, network diameter, and global efficiency is presented as the system dynamics undergoes transition from combustion noise to thermoacoustic instability. These network properties capture the change in system dynamics well before the rise in pressure amplitude levels in the combustors. These network properties can be used as early warning signals to detect the onset of impending thermoacoustic instabilities. ©2015 by Meenatchidevi Murugesan and R. I. Sujith. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

Journal of Propulsion and Power

Detecting the Onset of an Impending Thermoacoustic Instability Using Complex Networks

The dynamic transition from combustion noise to combustion instability was investigated experimentally in two laboratory-scale turbulent combustors (namely, swirl-stabilized and bluff-body-stabilized backward-facing-step combustors) by systematically varying the flow Reynolds number. We observe that the onset of combustion-driven oscillations is always presaged by intermittent bursts of high-amplitude periodic oscillations that appear in a near-random fashion amidst regions of aperiodic low-amplitude fluctuations. These excursions to periodic oscillations last longer in time as operating conditions approach instability and finally the system transitions completely into periodic oscillations. A continuous measure to quantify this bifurcation in dynamics can be obtained by defining an order parameter as the probability of the signal amplitude exceeding a predefined threshold. A hysteresis zone was observed in the bluff-body-stabilized configuration that was absent in the swirl-stabilized configuration. The recurrence properties of the dynamics of intermittent burst oscillations were quantified using recurrence plots and the distribution of the aperiodic phases was examined. From the statistics of these aperiodic phases, robust early-warning signals of an impending combustion instability may be obtained. © 2014 Cambridge University Press.

Intermittency route to thermoacoustic instability in turbulent combustors

In this paper, we show how the phenomenon of intermittency observed in systems with turbulent flow-sound interaction is related to the formation of homoclinic orbits in the phase space. Such orbits that emerge via the intersection of the stable and unstable manifold of an equilibrium configuration result from interactions that happen at multiple spatial/temporal scales associated with turbulent convection and wave propagation. Through a quantification of the time spent by the dynamics in the aperiodic states using recurrence plots, we show how the presence of homoclinic orbits in the dynamics may be convincingly demonstrated, which is often not possible through a visual inspection of the phase space of the attractor. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.

Identifying homoclinic orbits in the dynamics of intermittent signals through recurrence quantification

Combustion noise has been traditionally thought of as stochastic fluctuations present in the background of the dynamics in combustors amongst the flow, heat release and the chamber acoustics. Through a series of determinism tests, we show that these aperiodic fluctuations are in fact chaotic of moderately high dimensions (d0 8-10). These chaotic fluctuations then transition to high amplitude combustion instability when the operating conditions are varied towards leaner equivalence ratios. Precursors to such a transition from chaos to dynamics dominated by periodic oscillations are of interest to designers and operators of combustors in estimating the boundaries of operability. We introduce a test for chaos, known as 0-1 test for chaos in the literature, as a measure of the proximity of the combustor to an impending instability. The measure is robust and shows a smooth transition for variation in flow conditions towards instability enabling thresholds to be set for operational boundaries.

International Journal of Spray and Combustion Dynamics

Loss of chaos in combustion noise as a precursor of impending combustion instability

Experimental data on acoustic pressure measurements obtained over a wide range of conditions is reported for two simple geometries that are commonly studied for their combustion dynamics behaviour. These geometries are the confined bluff-body and the confined backward-facing steps. The data indicate regimes of flow-acoustic lock-on that signifies the onset of combustion instability, marked by the excitation of high-amplitude discrete tones of sound in the combustor. The high-speed chemiluminescence imaging of the combustion zone indicates heat-release-rate fluctuations occurring at the same frequencies as observed in the acoustic spectra. Attention is then devoted to the data obtained under cold-flow conditions to illustrate distinctly different behaviour than when combustion instability occurs, contrary to the commonly held view that the combustion process does not alter the underlying fluid mechanical processes under low-Mach number conditions. © Printed in India.

Journal	Data powered by TypesetJournal of Fluid Mechanics
Publisher	Data powered by TypesetCambridge University Press
ISSN	00221120
Open Access	No