Forced and self-excited oscillations in a natural gas fired lean premixed combustor

An experimental study of the flame response in a premixed gas turbine combustor has been conducted at room temperature and under atmospheric pressure inlet conditions using natural gas. The fuel is premixed with the air upstream of a choked inlet to avoid equivalence ratio fluctuations. Therefore the observed flame response is only the result of the imposed velocity fluctuations, which are produced using a variable-speed siren. Also, a variable length combustor is designed for investigating characteristics of self-excited instabilities. Measurements are made of the velocity fluctuation in the mixing section using hot wire anemometry and of the heat release fluctuation in the combustor using chemiluminescence emission. The results are analyzed to determine the phase and gain of the flame transfer function.The results show that the gain of flame transfer function is closely associated both with inlet flow forcing conditions such as frequency and amplitude of modulation as well as the operating conditions such as equivalence ratio. In order to predict the operating conditions where the combustor goes stable or unstable at given combustor and nozzle designs, time-lag analysis was tried using convection time delay measured from the phase information of the transfer function. The model prediction was in very good agreement with the self-excited instability measurement. However, spatial heat release distribution became more significant in long flames than in short flames and also had an important influence on the system damping procedure.