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Combustor blowout is a very serious concern in modern land-based and aircraft engine combustors. The ability to sense blowout precursors can provide significant payoffs in engine reliability and life. The objective of this work is to characterize the blowout phenomenon and develop a sensing methodology which can detect and assess the proximity of a combustor to blowout by monitoring its acoustic signature, thus providing early warning before the actual blowout of the combustor. The first part of the work examines the blowout phenomenon in a piloted jet burner. As blowout was approached, the flame detached from one side of the burner and showed increased flame tip fluctuations, resulting in an increase in low frequency acoustics. Work was then focused on swirling combustion systems. Close to blowout, localized extinction/re-ignition events were observed, which manifested as bursts in the acoustic signal. These events increased in number and duration as the combustor approached blowout, resulting an increase in low frequency acoustics. A variety of spectral, wavelet and thresholding based approaches were developed to detect precursors to blowout. The third part of the study focused on a bluff body burner. It characterized the underlying flame dynamics near blowout in greater detail and related it to the observed acoustic emissions. Vorticity was found to play a significant role in the flame dynamics. The flame passed through two distinct stages prior to blowout. The first was associated with momentary strain levels that exceed the flames extinction strain rate, leading to flame holes. The second was due to large scale alteration of the fluid dynamics in the bluff body wake, leading to violent flapping of the flame front and even larger straining of the flame. This led to low frequency acoustic oscillations, of the order of von Karman vortex shedding. This manifested as an abrupt increase in combustion noise spectra at 40-100 Hz very close to blowout. Finally, work was also done to improve the robustness of lean blowout detection by developing integration techniques that combined data from acoustic and optical sensors.

Lean, premixed combustion offers a practical approach for reducing nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, but increases the risk of lean blowout (LBO) in gas turbines. Active control techniques are therefore sought which can stabilize a lean flame and prevent LBO. The present work has resulted in the development of flame detection, dynamic modeling, blowout margin estimation, and actuation and control techniques. The flame s acoustic emissions were bandpass filtered at select frequencies to detect localized extinction events, which were found to increase in number near LBO. The lean flame was also found to intermittently burst into a transient tornado configuration in which the flame s inner recirculation zone would collapse. The localized extinctions were dynamically linked to the tornado bursts using a linear, first order model. The model was subsequently applied to predict tornado bursts based on optically detected localized extinction events. It was found that both localized extinctions and tornado bursts are by themselves Poisson processes; the exponential distribution of their spacing times could be used to determine blowout probability. Blowout mitigation was achieved by redistributing the fuel flow between the annular swirlers and central preinjection pilot, both of which were premixed. Rule-based and lead-lag control architectures were developed and validated.

This thesis describes an experimental investigation of lean blowoff for H2/CO/CH4 mixtures in a swirling combustor. This investigation consisted of three thrusts. The first thrust focused on correlations of the lean blowoff limits of H2/CO/CH4 mixtures under different test conditions. It was found that a classical Damköhler number approach with a diffusion correction could correlate blowoff sensitivities to fuel composition over a range of conditions. The second part of this thesis describes the qualitative flame dynamics near blowoff by systematically characterizing the blowoff phenomenology as a function of hydrogen level in the fuel. These near blowoff dynamics are very complex, and are influenced by both fluid mechanics and chemical kinetics; in particular, the role of thermal expansion across the flame and extinction strain rate were suggested to be critical in describing these influences. The third part of this thesis quantitatively analyzed strain characteristics in the vicinity of the attachment point of stable and near blowoff flames. Surprisingly, it was found that in this shear layer stabilized flame, flow deceleration is the key contributor to flame strain, with flow shear playing a relatively negligible role. Near the premixer exit, due to strong flow deceleration, the flame is negatively strained i.e., compressed. Moving downstream, the strain rate increases towards zero and then becomes positive, where flames are stretched. As the flame moves toward blowoff, holes begin to form in the flame sheet, with a progressively higher probability of occurrence as one moves downstream. It is suggested that new holes form with a more uniform probability, but that this behavior reflects the convection of flame holes downstream by the flow. It has been shown in prior studies, and affirmed in this work, that flames approach blowoff by first passing through a transient phase manifested by local extinction events and the appearance of holes on the flame. A key conclusion of this work is that the onset of this boundary occurs at a nearly constant extinction strain rate. As such, it is suggested that Damköhler number scalings do not describe blowoff itself, but rather the occurrence of this first stage of blowoff. Given the correspondence between this first stage and the actual blowoff event, this explains the success of classical Damköhler number scalings in describing blowoff, such as shown in the first thrust of this thesis. The physics process associated with the actual blowoff event is still unclear and remains a key task for future work.

Magnetic flux emergence is a fundamental process in the Sun, during which magnetic fields emerge from the solar interior to the surface, to build up active regions and give onset to spectacular dynamic phenomena, such as eruptions and jets. In this thesis, we performed 3D, resistive MHD simulations to study the emergence and the associated magnetic activity of a quadrupolar region in the Sun. Our aim behind the setup of this initial condition (i.e. a quadrupolar region) was to study a magnetic field configuration, which has not been studied in detail before, although it has been repeatedly observed in the Sun and it has been shown that it can host intense magnetic activity (e.g. in the form of jets, flares and eruptions). The results of our experiments showed that the internal dynamics of such regions leads to the onset of eruptions in the form of twisted magnetic flux tubes (flux ropes). These eruptions are recurrent but they cannot escape the outermost field of the emerging flux (envelope field). They remain confined within the envelope field, as the downward tension of the outermost field lines overwhelms the upward Lorentz force of the erupting field. When we add an ambient magnetic field in the solar atmosphere, external reconnection between the emerging and the ambient field triggers the emission of (standard) reconnection jets. The external reconnection also releases the tension of the ambient field lines and, thus, the eruptions move in an ejective way towards the outer space. Namely, the confined eruptions become ejective eruptions, which escape from the numerical domain. These ejective eruptions drive a newly observed class of jets, the so called "blowout" jets. Our experiments reproduce some of the main observed characteristics of the "blowout" jets. We showed that "blowout" jets emit hot and cool plasma into the outer solar atmosphere simultaneously, and they undergo untwisting motion due to the relaxation of twist during their ejection. We found that the untwisting motion of the "blowout" jets is associated with the propagation of torsional Alfvén waves. Finally, we performed a parametric study to explore the effect of the ambient field strength on the onset and dynamics of the eruptive events. We found that one of the main effects is that the stronger ambient field suppresses the vertical expansion of the magnetic envelope of the quadrupolar region due to the higher magnetic pressure above it. This result has an effect on the emission of jets, which are emitted due to reconnection between the two fields. When the ambient field is relatively weak, it is pushed away from the strong emerging field and reconnection between them is not so persistent. On the other hand, when the ambient field is relatively strong, we find that more jets are ejected due to more efficient and more frequent reconnection between the two flux systems. As a consequence, we find that more mass and flux is being transferred into the solar corona by the reconnection jets. Also, we find that there are more eruptions when the ambient field is stronger. The study of the total energy flux carried by the jets showed that it is sufficient to provide the energy required to accelerate the high speed solar wind. This indicates that the "blowout" jets may play an important role in driving the solar wind.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T17:42:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo7455_1.pdf: 1724462 bytes, checksum: 37576cc1af1d39240ac4500389934e30 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / A principal preocupação com a exploração de poços de petróleo, em se tratando de segurança operacional, é a possibilidade de blowout durante as operações de perfuração. Blowout é a liberação de hidrocarbonetos sob pressão. Caso ocorra a ignição imediata desses hidrocarbonetos, o incêndio esperado é um jet fire. O jet fire são chamas difusivas resultante da combustão de líquidos ou gases liberados sob pressão de forma contínua. Normalmente, a energia térmica liberada pelo jet fire é muito alta e, portanto, bastante destrutiva para as estruturas adjacentes. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo estrutura uma metodologia para analisar as conseqüências de um blowout durante a perfuração de poços offshore. A metodologia desenvolvida foi baseada no modelo de gerenciamento dos riscos de incêndio proposto pela Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) e foca o impacto da energia térmica em seres humanos em plataformas offshore. A metodologia desenvolvida foi aplicada em exemplos práticos. Os estudos de caso foram estruturados da seguinte maneira, o primeiro com uma alta vazão de gás natural e sem a influência do vento; o segundo com baixa vazão de gás natural sem a influencia do vento e por fim, o terceiro com baixa vazão de gás natural levando em consideração a ação do vento. Os resultados obtidos mostraram a seriedade do problema em questão. Desenvolveu-se um software para estimar a energia térmica irradiada pela chama e os impactos desta energia em seres humanos

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