This paper considers the effects of background turbulent fluctuations upon a combustor’s stability boundaries. Inherent turbulent fluctuations act as both additive and parametric (also called multiplicative) excitation sources to acoustic waves in combustors. While additive noise sources exert primarily quantitative effects upon combustor oscillations, parametric noise sources can exert qualitative impacts upon its dynamics; particularly of interest here is their ability to destabilize a “nominally” stable system. The significance of these parametric noise sources increases with increased background noise levels and, thus, may play more of a role in realistic, high Reynolds number systems than experiments on simplified, lab scale combustors might suggest. The objective of this paper is to determine whether and/or when these effects might be significant. The analysis considers the effects of fluctuations in damping rate, frequency and combustion response. It is found that the effects of noisy damping and frequency upon the combustor’s stability limits is quite small, at least for the fluctuation intensities estimated here. The effects of a noisy combustion response, particularly of a fluctuating time delay between flow and heat release perturbations, can be quite significant, however, in some cases for turbulence intensities as low as <(u′/u¯)2>1/2∼5–10%. These results suggest that deterministic stability models calibrated on low turbulence intensity, lab scale combustors may not adequately describe the stability limits of realistic, highly turbulent combustors.
Modeling and Mapping of Combined Noise Annoyance for Aircraft and Road Traffic Based on a Partial Loudness Model