THERMOACOUSTIC INSTABILITIES IN AN ANNULAR RIJKE TUBE

Thermoacoustic instabilities are a major concern in the design of gas turbine combustors. Most modern combustion chambers have an annular shape with multiple circumferentially arranged burners and, accordingly, suffer often from azimuthal instability modes. However due to the complexity of a full annular system with a large number of burners, most experimental and numerical studies focus on single burner systems with essentially purely longitudinal acoustics. In the present work, we therefore introduce a thermoacoustic surrogate system - an annular Rtjke tube - which, albeit its simplicity, possesses the basic mechanisms to feature unstable azimuthal modes. As in a conventional Rijke tube, the sources of mean and unsteady heat release in our set-up are electrically driven heating grids. Different azimuthal instability modes are observed in the experiment, and the effect of two types of circumferential variations of the power input is investigated. A full suppression of the unstable modes is achieved by the application of an elementary feedback controller The experimental investigations are accompanied by corresponding calculations with a low-order system model. Theoretical and experimental results are found to agree well.