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Vortical interactions in turbulent thermoacoustic systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2025

Ankit Sahay Open the ORCID record for Ankit Sahay [Opens in a new window] ,
Muralikrishnan Gopalakrishnan Meena Open the ORCID record for Muralikrishnan Gopalakrishnan Meena [Opens in a new window]  and
R.I. Sujith Open the ORCID record for R.I. Sujith [Opens in a new window]
Ankit Sahay*
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India Centre of Excellence for studying Critical Transitions in Complex Systems, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India
Muralikrishnan Gopalakrishnan Meena
Affiliation:
National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
R.I. Sujith
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India Centre of Excellence for studying Critical Transitions in Complex Systems, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India
*
Corresponding author: Ankit Sahay, ankitsahay02@gmail.com
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Abstract

This study examines the dynamics of vortical interactions and their implications for mitigating thermoacoustic instability in a turbulent combustor. The regions of intense vortical interactions are identified as vortical communities in the network space of weighted directed vortical networks constructed from two-dimensional experimental velocity data. One can expect vortical interactions in the combustor to be strongest near the moment of vortex shedding, as the shed vortices gradually weaken due to dissipation while convecting downstream. However, we show that, during the state of thermoacoustic instability, there is a non-trivial consistent phase lag of approximately $52^\circ$ between the shedding of the coherent structures from the backward-facing step and the time instant when the vortical interactions attain their local maximum value. We explain this phase lag by investigating the correlation between acoustic pressure fluctuations, spatio-temporal dynamics of coherent structures and vortical interactions in the reaction field of the combustor. We also show the aperiodic variation of vortical interactions during the states of combustion noise and aperiodic epochs of intermittency. Furthermore, the spatio-temporal evolution of pairs of vortical communities with the maximum inter-community interactions provides insight into explaining the critical regions detected in the reaction field during the states of intermittency and thermoacoustic instability, also identified in previous studies. We further show that the most efficient suppression of thermoacoustic instability via air microjet injection is achieved when steady air jets are introduced to disrupt the maximum inter-community interactions present during the state of thermoacoustic instability.

JFM classification

Reacting Flows: Turbulent reacting flows Vortex Flows: Vortex interactions Vortex Flows: Vortex shedding

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Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 1018 , 10 September 2025 , A25
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© UT-Battelle, LLC and the Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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