Active control of the acoustic boundary conditions of combustion test rigs

In the design process of burners for gas turbines, new burner generations are generally tested in single or multi burner combustion test rigs. With these experiments, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element calculations, the burners’ performance in the full-scale engine is sought to be predicted. Especially, information about the thermoacoustic behaviour and the emission characteristics is very important. As the thermoacoustics strongly depend on the acoustic boundary conditions of the system, it is obvious that test rig conditions should match, or be close to those of the full-scale engine. This is, however, generally not the case. Hence, if the combustion process in the test rig is stable at certain operating conditions, it may show unfavourable dynamics at the same conditions in the engine. In this work, a method is proposed which uses an active control scheme to manipulate the acoustic boundary conditions of the test rig. Using this method, the boundary conditions can be continuously modified, ranging from anechoic to fully reflecting in a broad frequency range. The concept is applied to an atmospheric combustion test rig with a swirl-stabilized burner. It is shown that the test rig's properties can be tuned to correspond to those of the full-scale engine. For example, the test rig length can be virtually extended, thereby introducing different resonance frequencies, without having to implement any hardware changes. Furthermore, the acoustic boundary condition can be changed to that of a choked flow without actually needing the flow to be choked.