Simulation of 2-way Fluid Structure Interaction in a 3d Model Combustor

The liner of a gas turbine combustor is a very flexible structure that is exposed to the pressure oscillations that occur in the combustor. These pressure oscillations can be of very high amplitude due to thermoacoustic instability, when the fluctuations of the rate of heat release and the acoustic pressure waves amplify each other. The liner structure is a dynamic mechanical system that vibrates at its eigenfrequencies and at the frequencies by which it is forced by the pressure oscillations to which it is exposed. On the other hand the liner vibrations force a displacement of the flue gas near the wall in the combustor. The displacement is very small but this acts like a distributed acoustic source which is proportional to the liner wall acceleration. Hence liner and combustor are a coupled elasto-acoustic system. When this is exposed to a limit cycle oscillation the liner may fail due to fatigue. In this paper the method and the results will be presented of the partitioned simulation of the coupled acousto-elastic system composed of the liner and the flue gas domain in the combustor. The partitioned simulation uses separate solvers for the flow domain and the structural domain, that operate in a coupled way. In this work 2-way fluid structure interaction is studied for the case of a model combustor for the operating conditions 40-60 kW with equivalence ratio of 0.625. This is done in the framework of the LIMOUSINE project. Computational fluid dynamics analysis is performed to obtain the thermal loading of the combustor liner and finite element analysis renders the temperature, stress distribution and deformation in the liner. The software used is ANSYS workbench V13.0 software, in which the information (pressure and displacement) is also exchanged between fluid and structural domain transiently.