Combustion instability in gas turbine engines is often mitigated using fuel staging. Fuel staging, sometimes referred to as fuel splitting, is a strategy by which fuel is unevenly distributed between different nozzles of a multiplenozzle combustor. These fuel splits are conducted in a transient manner in real engines, and the effects of these transients on instability are not well characterized. This work fills this gap by systematically studying the effects of transient fuel staging on self-excited combustion instability by varying the amount of staging fuel (staging amplitude), timescale in which the fuel is added (transient duration), and whether staging fuel is added or subtracted (transient direction). In this work, three staging amplitudes, five transient durations, and both transient directions are considered. The tran- * Corresponding author.

Fuel staging is a commonly used strategy in the operation of gas turbine engines. In multinozzle combustor configurations, this is achieved by varying fuel flow rate to different nozzles. The effect of fuel staging on flame structure and self-excited instabilities is investigated in a research can combustor employing five swirl-stabilized, lean-premixed nozzles. At an operating condition where all nozzles are fueled equally and the combustor undergoes a self-excited instability, fuel staging successfully suppresses the instability: both when overall equivalence ratio is increased by staging as well as when overall equivalence ratio is kept constant while staging. Increased fuel staging changes the distribution of time-averaged heat release rate in the regions where adjacent flames interact and reduces the amplitudes of heat release rate fluctuations in those regions. Increased fuel staging also causes a breakup in the monotonic phase behavior that is characteristic of convective disturbances that travel along a flame. In particular, heat release rate fluctuations in the middle flame and flame–flame interaction region are out-of-phase with those in the outer flames, resulting in a cancelation of the global heat release rate oscillations. The Rayleigh integral distribution within the combustor shows that during a self-excited instability, the regions of highest heat release rate fluctuation are in phase-with the combustor pressure fluctuation. When staging fuel is introduced, these regions fluctuate out-of-phase with the pressure fluctuation, further illustrating that fuel staging suppresses instabilities through a phase cancelation mechanism.

An experimental investigation was conducted to determine the air-forced flame response of a five-nozzle, 250 kW, lean premixed gas turbine can combustor. Operating conditions were varied over a range of inlet temperatures, inlet velocities, and equivalence ratios, while the forcing frequency was varied from 100 to 450 Hz with constant normalized velocity fluctuations of approximately 5%. The response of the flame’s rate of heat release to inlet velocity fluctuations is expressed in terms of the phase and gain of a flame transfer function. In addition, chemiluminescence imaging is used to characterize the time-averaged and phase-averaged spatial distribution of the flame’s heat release. The resulting flame transfer functions and chemiluminescence flame images are compared to each other to determine the effects of varying the operating conditions. In addition, they are compared to data obtained from a single-nozzle combustor with the same injector. The forced response of the multi-nozzle flame demonstrates a similar pattern to those obtained in a single-nozzle combustor with the same injector. An exception occurs at high frequency where the multi-nozzle flame responds to a greater degree than the single-nozzle flame. At low frequency the multi-nozzle flame dampens the perturbations while the single-nozzle flame amplifies them. A number of minima and maxima occur at certain frequencies which correspond to the interference of two mechanisms. The frequency of these minima is nearly the same for the single- and multi-nozzle cases. When plotted with respect to Strouhal number instead of frequency there is a degree of collapse that occurs around the first observed minima.

Combustion instability in gas turbines can be mitigated using active techniques or passive techniques, but passive techniques are almost exclusively used in industrial settings. While fuel staging, a common passive technique, is effective in reducing the amplitude of self-excited instabilities in gas turbine combustors at steady-state conditions, the effect of transients in fuel staging on self-excited instabilities is not well understood. This paper examines the effect of fuel staging transients on a laboratory-scale five-nozzle can combustor undergoing self-excited instabilities. The five nozzles are arranged in a four-around-one configuration and fuel staging is accomplished by increasing the center nozzle equivalence ratio. When the global equivalence ratio is φ = 0.70 and all nozzles are fueled equally, the combustor undergoes self-excited oscillations. These oscillations are suppressed when the center nozzle equivalence ratio is increased to φ = 0.80 or φ = 0.85. Two transient staging schedules are used, resulting in transitions from unstable to stable operation, and vice-versa. It is found that the characteristic instability decay times are dependent on the amount of fuel staging in the center nozzle. It is also found that the decay time constants differ from the growth time constants, indicating hysteresis in stability transition points. High speed CH* chemiluminescence images in combination with dynamic pressure measurements are used to determine the instantaneous phase difference between the heat release rate fluctuation and the combustor pressure fluctuation throughout the combustor. This analysis shows that the instability onset process is different from the instability decay process.

A tomographic image reconstruction technique has been developed to measure the 3D distribution of CH* chemiluminescence of unforced and forced turbulent premixed flames. Measurements are obtained in a lean premixed, swirl-stabilized multi-nozzle can combustor. Line-of-sight images are acquired at equally spaced angle increments using a single intensified charge-coupled device camera. 3D images of the flames are reconstructed by applying a filtered back projection algorithm to the acquired line-of-sight images. Methods of viewing 3D images to characterize the structure, dynamics, interaction and spatial differences of multi-nozzle flames are presented. Accuracy of the reconstruction technique is demonstrated by comparing reconstructed line-of-sight images to measured line-of-sight downstream-view images of unforced flames. The effect of the number of acquired projection images on the quality of the reconstruction is assessed.The reconstructed 3D images of the unforced multi-nozzle flames show the structure of individual flames as well as the interaction regions between flames. Forced flame images are obtained by phase-synchronizing the camera to the forcing cycle. The resulting 3D reconstructions of forced flames reveal the spatial and temporal response of the multinozzle flame structure to imposed velocity fluctuations, information which is essential to identifying the underlying mechanisms responsible for this behavior.