Modeling and Active Control of Nonlinear Unsteady Motions in Combustion Chambers.

Abstract

This program is devoted to understanding fundamental process in actual combustion chambers through coordination of theory, analysis and experiment. Theoretical work has been carried out in the framework of an approach based on a form of Galerkin's method. General unsteady motions are synthesized of modes. Spatial averaging produces a representation of the unsteady behavior in a combustion chamber as the time evolution of a system of coupled nonlinear oscillators, one for each mode. Consequently, immediate advantage can be taken of the methods available in contemporary research on nonlinear dynamical systems. The experimental work has involved ties with a Rijke tube with the Caltech dump combustor developed and used in work funded by AFOSR over the past 12 years. Those tests have demonstrated that due the presence of hysteresis in the stability of oscillations in the dump combustor, suppression of the oscillations is possible over a wide range of equivalence ratio by pulsed injection of secondary fuel in the recirculation zone. We have shown that the behavior is related to a subcritical bifurcation in the dynamics of the recirculation zone and unsteady combustion associated with vortex shedding.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 28, 1996
Accession Number
ADA310960

Entities

People

  • F. E. Culick

Organizations

  • California Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acoustics
  • Chambers
  • Chemical Kinetics
  • Combustion
  • Combustion Chambers
  • Combustors
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Differential Equations
  • Dynamics
  • Flow
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Gas Turbines
  • Ignition Lag
  • Oscillators
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Vortex Shedding

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Combustion and Flow Dynamics.
  • Control Systems Engineering.
  • Theoretical Analysis.