Measurements of periodic Reynolds stress oscillations in a forced turbulent premixed swirling flame

Abstract

This work is motivated by the thermoacoustic instability challenges associated with ultra-low emissions gas turbine combustors. It demonstrates the first use of high-speed dual-plane orthogonally-polarized stereoscopic-particle image velocimetry and synchronized OH planar laser-induced fluorescence in a premixed swirling flame. We use this technique to explore the effects of combustion and longitudinal acoustic forcing on the time- and phase-averaged flow field - particularly focusing on the behavior of the Reynolds stress in the presence of harmonic forcing. We observe significant differences between ensemble averaged and time averaged Reynolds stress. This implies that the large-scale motions are non-ergodic, due to coherent oscillations in Reynolds stress associated with the convection of periodic vortical structures. This result has important implications on hydrodynamic stability models and reduced order computational fluid dynamics simulations, which do show the importance of turbulent transport on the problem, but do not capture these coherent oscillations in their models.