Background-Oriented Schlieren for the Detection of Thermoacoustic Oscillations in Flames

Thermoacoustic oscillations are well known to combustion engineers. They are not only a cause of concern, but also give hope to be able to operate aircraft engines with hydrogen, due to flame stabilization and significant reduction of NOx emissions when thermoacoustically excited. The aim of this work is to investigate the potential of using a heterodyne background-oriented schlieren (HBOS) technique to detect thermoacoustic oscillations in the density field of an acoustically excited flame. It also seeks to address the issue of accuracy due to the small amplitude of thermoacoustic oscillations compared to turbulent density fluctuations in a flame. The experiment uses an unconfined swirl-stabilized methane flame and investigates thermoacoustic oscillations at about 3.4 kW power at ambient conditions excited by a siren at 225 Hz. The HBOS technique recently presented by the authors uses a carrier fringe system in background-oriented schlieren recordings, with subsequent analysis using evaluation techniques known from holographic interferometry. These fast algorithms reduce turbulence noise by phase averaging a large number of images. To derive local data from the line-of-sight projections, an inverse Abel transform is applied. Laser interferometric vibrometry is used to calibrate to the observed oscillations. A comparison with data from chemiluminescence is also presented to better demonstrate the application of this efficient technique to the detection of heat release oscillations. Future tasks in this project will deal with full-scale test benches and machine learning tools to address the limited observations in them.