Large Eddy Simulation of combustion instabilities in a lean partially premixed swirled flame

This paper investigates one issue related to Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of self-excited combustion instabilities in gas-fueled swirled burners: the effects of incomplete mixing between fuel and air at the combustion chamber inlet. Perfect premixing of the gases entering the combustion chamber is rarely achieved in practical applications and this study investigates its impact by comparing LES assuming perfect premixing and LES where the fuel jets are resolved so that fuel/air mixing is explicitely computed. This work demonstrates that the perfect premixing assumption is reasonable for stable flows but is not acceptable to predict self-excited unstable cases. This is shown by comparing LES and experimental fields in terms of mean and RMS fields of temperature, species, velocities as well as mixture fraction pdfs and unsteady activity for two regimes: a stable one at equivalence ratio 0.83 and an unstable one at 0.7. (C) 2011 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.