Studies on Combustion Instabilities in Gas Turbine Engine Combustors

Abstract

Combustion instability has become a main technical challenge in the development of low-emission combustors of aero and land-based gas-turbine engines as it may cause catastrophic damages to the combustion chambers. Therefore, combustion stability is one of the major performance requirements of the current gas-turbine engines. In this article, two recent studies on gas-turbine combustion instabilities, one is of a simple model gas-fuel combustor and the other is of an aero-engine liquid-fuel combustor, are introduced. As a key aspect, the effects of temporal and spatial variations of equivalence ratio on the combustion instabilities are discussed.