Numerical study of flame stability, stabilization and noise in a swirl-stabilized combustor under choked conditions. (Etude numerique de la stabilite, la stabilisation et le bruit de flamme dans un bruleur tourbillonnaire en conditions amorcees)

Air transportation is an essential part of modern business and leisure needs, and the number of passengers carried per year is rapidly increasing worldwide. The International Civil Aviation Organization estimates that this number went from 2.2 billion in 2009 to 3.0 billion in 2013, due in part to rapid growth in emerging countries such as China. Many challenges for aircraft designers arise from this increase in air traffic, such as meeting pollutant and noise emission regulations. The engines play a major part in these emissions, and combustor technology has evolved towards high-pressure Lean Prevaporized Premixed (LPP) combustion to increase efficiency and decrease pollutant emissions. Unfortunately, this technology tends to reduce engine robustness, with a decrease in flame stability and stabilization margins. Recent studies suggest that combustion noise could also be increased in these systems. New methods are needed to describe and understand the mechanisms at hand for future design and optimization in order to operate these engines safely while still achieving emission targets. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is a numerical approach to these problems which has shown excellent results in the past and is very promising for future design. The description of unsteady phenomena in these power-dense, confined and unsteady systems is essential to describe flame-turbulence interactions, acoustics and multiphysic couplings. As computing power grows, so does the amount of physics which can be modeled. Computational domains can be increased, and have gone from including only the reacting zone, to adding the fuel-air mixing areas, the heat liners and secondary flows, and the upstream and downstream elements. In this Ph.D., a compressible LES solver named AVBP is used to describe an academic test rig operated at the EM2C laboratory named CESAM-HP, a pressurized combustion chamber containing a swirl-stabilized partially-premixed flame and ended by a choked nozzle with high-speed flow. This leads to an accurate description of the chamber outlet acoustic behavior, and offers the possibility to investigate the dynamic behavior of the full system, and the occurrence of flame-acoustic coupling leading to combustion instabilities. It also gives insight into the combustion noise mechanisms, which are known to occur both in the reacting zone and in the nozzle. As shown in this study, this behavior also has an impact on flame stabilization in this system. This manuscript is organized as follows. In a first part, the context for chemistry, motion and acoustics of reacting multi-species flow is given. State of the art theories on reacting multi-species flow thermodynamics, thermoacoustics, combustion noise and flame stabilization in swirled burners are presented. Basic toy models and test cases are derived to validate the understanding of direct and indirect combustion noise, and numerical validations are performed. In a second part, the practical details about numerical investigation of such systems are reported. Finally, the third part describes the application of these tools and methods to the CESAM-HP4 test rig. The inclusion of the compressible nozzle in the LES computation yields results concerning three major issues for the burner: (1) flame stability, related to thermoacoustic instabilities; (2) flame stabilization, and the occurrence of flame flashback into the system’s injection duct; (3) combustion noise produced by the system, and identification of its separate contributions.