The Use of Perforated Damping Liners in Aero Gas Turbine Combustion Systems

This paper considers the use of perforated porous liners for the absorption of acoustic energy within aero style gas turbine combustion systems. The overall combustion system pressure drop means that the porous liner (or “damping skin”) is typically combined with a metering skin. This enables most of the mean pressure drop, across the flame tube, to occur across the metering skin with the porous liner being exposed to a much smaller pressure drop. In this way porous liners can potentially be designed to provide significant levels of acoustic damping, but other requirements (e.g., cooling, available space envelope, etc) must also be considered as part of this design process. A passive damper assembly was incorporated within an experimental isothermal facility that simulated an aero-engine style flame tube geometry. The damper was therefore exposed to the complex flow field present within an engine environment (e.g., swirling efflux from a fuel injector, coolant film passing across the damper surface, etc.). In addition, plane acoustic waves were generated using loudspeakers so that the flow field was subjected to unsteady pressure fluctuations. This enabled the performance of the damper, in terms of its ability to absorb acoustic energy, to be evaluated. To complement the experimental investigation a simplified one-dimensional (1D) analytical model was also developed and validated against the experimental results. In this way not only was the performance of the acoustic damper evaluated, but also the fundamental processes responsible for this measured performance could be identified. Furthermore, the validated analytical model also enabled a wide range of damping geometry to be assessed for a range of operating conditions. In this way damper geometry can be optimized (e.g., for a given space envelope) while the onset of nonlinear absorption (and hence the potential to ingest hot gas) can also be identified.