Thermoacoustic instability can disrupt the operation of gas turbine combustors. The study of these instabilities is a long-standing problem in combustion science, that is still widely investigated towards a better understanding of power generation systems, and their design and operations. This interdisciplinary project addresses the prediction of thermoacoustic instability by using mathematical tools developed for the analysis of dynamic systems with multiple time delays.
This project will attack the important problem of predicting thermoacoustic instability using tools for the analysis of neutral time delayed systems. This approach provides exact and exhaustive descriptions of stability maps for the particular class of systems under study in the parametric space of the dynamics. This project will specialize this tool to the equations of thermoacoustics in order to create new design tools for the prediction of instability in combustors. A simple benchmark combustor, called the Rijke's tube, will be taken as the test platform during this research, in order to demonstrate the validity of the project's mathematical paradigm.
