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International audienceThe objectives of this paper are the description of azimuthal instability modes found in annular combus- tion chambers using two numerical tools: (1) Large Eddy Simulation (LES) methods and (2) acoustic solv- ers. These strong combustion instabilities are difficult to study experimentally and the present study is based on a LES of a full aeronautical combustion chamber. The LES exhibits a self-excited oscillation at the frequency of the first azimuthal eigenmode. The mesh independence of the LES is verified before ana- lysing the nature of this mode using various indicators over more than 100 cycles: the mode is mostly a pure standing mode but it transitions from time to time to a turning mode because of turbulent fluctu- ations, confirming experimental observations and theoretical results. The correlation between pressure and heat release fluctuations (Rayleigh criterion) is not verified locally but it is satisfied when pressure and heat release are averaged over sectors. LES is also used to check modes predicted by an acoustic Helmholtz solver where the flow is frozen and flames are modelled using a Flame Transfer Function (FTF) as done in most present tools. The results in terms of mode structure compare well confirming that the mode appearing in the LES is the first azimuthal mode of the chamber. Moreover, the acoustic solver provides stability maps suggesting that a reduction of the time delay of the FTF would be enough to sta- bilise the mode. This is confirmed with LES by increasing the flame speed and verifying that this modi- fication leads to a damped mode in a few cycles

While most academic set ups used to study combustion instabilities are limited to single burners and are submitted mainly to longitudinal acoustic modes, real gas turbines exhibit mostly azimuthal modes due to the annular shape of their chambers. This study presents a massively parallel Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of a full helicopter combustion chamber in which a self-excited azimuthal mode develops naturally. The whole chamber is computed from the diffuser outlet to the High Pressure Stator nozzle. LES captures this self-excited instability and results (unsteady pressure RMS and phase fields) show that it is characterized by two superimposed rotating modes with different amplitudes. These turning modes modulate the flow rate through the fifteen burners and the flames oscillate back and forth in front of each burner, leading to local heat release fluctuations. LES demonstrates that the first effect of the turning modes is to induce longitudinal pulsations of the flow rates through individual burners. The transfer functions of all burners are the same and no mechanism of flame interactions between burners within the chamber is identified.

Being able to ignite or reignite a gas turbine engine in a cold and rarefied atmosphere is a critical issue for many manufacturers. From a fundamental point of view, the ignition of the first burner and the flame propagation from one burner to another one are phenomena which are usually not studied. The present work is a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of these phenomena. To simulate a complete ignition sequence in an annular chamber, LES has been applied to the full 360 degrees geometry including 18 burners. This geometry corresponds to a real gas turbine chamber.Massively parallel computing (700 processors on a Cray XT3 machine) was essential to perform such a large calculation. Results show that liquid fuel injection has a strong influence on the ignition times. Moreover, the rate of flame progress from burner to burner is much higher than the turbulent flame speed due to a major effect of thermal expansion. This flame speed is also strongly modified by the main burners aerodynamics due to the swirled injection. Finally, a variability of the combustor sectors and quadrants ignition times is highlighted.

International audienceThis study describes a simple analytical method to compute the azimuthal modes appearing in annular combustion chambers and help analyzing experimental, acoustic and large eddy simulation (LES) data obtained in these combustion chambers. It is based on a one-dimensional zero Mach number formulation where N burners are connected to a single annular chamber. A manipulation of the corresponding acoustic equations in this configuration leads to a simple dispersion relation which can be solved by hand when the interaction indices of the flame transfer function are small and numerically when they are not. This simple tool is applied to multiple cases: (1) a single burner connected to an annular chamber (N = 1), (2) two burners connected to the chamber (N = 2), and (3) four burners (N = 4). In this case, the tool also allows to study passive control methods where two different types of burners are mixed to control the azimuthal mode. Finally, a complete helicopter chamber (N = 15) is studied. For all cases, the analytical results are compared to the predictions of a full three-dimensional Helmholtz solver and a very good agreement is found. These results show that building very simple analytical tools to study azimuthal modes in annular chambers is an interesting path to control them