Studies of swirl burner characteristics, flame lengths and relative pressure amplitudes

Swirl stabilized combustion is a technology which, for stationary combustion, consumes more than 70 to 80% of the world's fossil fuels. There have been many reviews of this technology, but there are still many gaps in understanding. This paper focuses on the general characteristics of a 100kW swirl burner, originally designed for poor quality fuels, in terms of flame characteristic, length and pressure fluctuations, to give a relative measure of the propensity of the system to respond to outside perturbations. Studied effects include swirl number, symmetry of the swirl flow system, type of fuel injector and mode of fuel injection. A range of techniques, including High Speed Photography (HSP), Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and fluctuating pressure measurements were used to create flame maps, flame length detail, and relative pressure amplitudes graphs. The results are discussed in the context of potential oscillations and coupling mechanisms including the effect of the precessing vortex core (PVC), recirculation and shear flow instabilities