Experimental Study of the Dynamics of Lean Premixed Hydrogen Flames in a Multi Jet Combustor

Abstract In this study, the flame dynamics of lean premixed hydrogen jet flames are experimentally investigated. Acoustic and optical measurement devices are used to capture the response of a bundle of jet flames to acoustic forcing. Using helium as a fuel surrogate, we simulate the change in acoustic properties in the burner during the determination of cold burner transfer matrix measurements in order to avoid dangerous experiments. We investigate the influence of the equivalence ratio and the addition of methane as well as the interaction of the individual flames to evaluate the scalability of the results to systems with more flames. It is shown that the changes in the dynamic flame response can primarily be explained by the flame length, which changes both with the methane share and with the equivalence ratio. It can be observed that with small changes in the equivalence ratio, the flame length and the flame transfer function (FTF) change in the same way as with a small change in the gas composition. To assess the scalability of these results, we deactivate some of the jet flames and analyze how the overall response to acoustic forcing changes. We find that the FTF phase is not affected by the number of active flames. Analyzing the respective gain values, significantly stronger responses are measured for a few flames, but only small difference can be measured above a certain number of neighboring flames so that the lab scale results can also be expected to be valid for industrial configurations with a high number of flames.