4D measurements and analysis of heat release rate in a model gas turbine combustor

Time-resolved volumetric measurements (4D measurements) were performed to study the heat release rate characteristics in a model gas turbine combustor at 10 kHz. For this purpose, a high-speed camera combined with an image intensifier and a set of customized fiber probes were employed to continuously capture the CH* chemiluminescence signals from nine different viewing angles. Based on the measurements, the computed tomography program was performed to reconstruct the shot-to-shot 3D distributions of the CH* signals. Specific focuses have been made to demonstrate the capabilities of the current tomographic technique in applications of a realistic combustor, in which the full optical access was usually not available for every viewing angle. The results showed that the 3D reconstruction can successfully retrieval the flame edge contours rather than the signal intensity. The flame surface area was then calculated based on the reconstructed flame edge contours and used to infer the heat release rate. The fluctuation of global/local flame surface area indicated that there existed distinct difference between the global instability and local instabilities at various locations in the non-symmetric combustor. The global instability appears to be an integration of those local instabilities.