SUMMARY

To satisfy stringent NOx emission restrictions, modern gas turbine has developed toward lean, premixed combustion systems, which introduces a new challenge called 'thermoacoustic instability'. This instability limits the turbine's operating conditions, reduces hardware lifetimes, and eventually destroys the combustor hardware. Therefore, the importance of understanding thermoacoustic phenomena in gas turbine combustors has increased sharply.
This study focuses on the transverse instability in a multi-nozzle can combustor. This proposal first addresses a question of how to optimally identify the acoustic mode with a given number of pressure sensors. Additionally, the proposed work will try to answer the question of what causes the bifurcation between standing and spinning modes during the instability. As a final step, this proposed work will develop a low order modeling to reduce the gap between the modeling and the experimental observations.