Characterization and modeling of aperiodic pressure oscillations in combustion chambers

Classification of the long-term dynamical behavior of pressure oscillations in a laboratory combustion chamber has been performed using methods of modern dynamical systems theory. The method involves the construction of a phase-space representation from a single pressure record or time series using the time-delay embedding method. The pointwise correlation dimension of the resulting attractor in phase-space provides a lower bound on the number of modes that participate in the oscillations. The results show that the oscillations are quasiperiodic with a dimension near two over an order of magnitude of amplitudes. Quasiperiodicity is a result of the incommensurate frequencies of the system acoustic modes. A model for the dynamics is constructed by converting the governing equations to a kicked-oscillator model. When compared with the experimental data, the model results have similar pressure and velocity spectra and the attractor dimension verifies that quasiperiodic oscillations are present.