High Amplitude Combustion Instabilities in an Annular Combustor Inducing Pressure Field Deformation and Flame Blow Off

This article reports experiments carried out in the laboratory scale annular combustor MICCA-spray equipped with multiple swirling spray injectors. The experimental setup consists in an air plenum connected to a combustion chamber formed by two concentric cylindrical quartz tubes, allowing full optical access to the flames. A new injection system is introduced and characterized. For a wide range of operating conditions, strong combustion instabilities are observed, but the focus of this article is placed on very high amplitude combustion instabilities coupled by a standing azimuthal mode. New results are obtained using a higher order reconstruction method for the pressure field: its shape is shown to be modified during high amplitude oscillation, leading to asymmetries of the pressure distribution in the system. Flame blow off occurs near the pressure nodal line when a critical level of oscillation is reached. A method is proposed to reconstruct the acoustic velocity field just before blow off occurs and in this way determine the blow off threshold. It is found that the pressure distribution, velocity field, and blow off pattern become asymmetric as the amplitude of oscillation increases and that this process is accompanied by a rapid shift in frequency of oscillation. Another notable result is that the heat release rate in the flames on the same side of the nodal line is not perfectly in phase and that the phase differences become larger as the amplitude of oscillation increases.