Use of Temporal Irreversibility of Symbolic Time Series for Early Detection of Extinction in Thermal Pulse Combustors
A nonlinear fourth-order dynamic model of a thermal pulse combustor has been developed. In this work, the time series data generated by solution of the fourth order system is converted into a set of symbols based on the values of pressure variables. The key step to symbolization involves transformation of the original values to a stream of discretised symbols by partitioning the range of observed values into a finite number of regions and then assigning a symbol to each measurement based on the region in which it falls. Once all the measured values are symbolized, a symbol sequence vector consisting of L successive temporal observations is defined and its relative frequency is determined. In this work, the relative frequencies of different symbol sequences are computed by scanning the time series data in forward and reverse directions. The difference between the relative frequencies obtained in forward and reverse scanning is termed as "irreversibility" of the process. It is observed that for given alphabet and word sizes, the "irreversibility" increases as the system approaches extinction. The effects of different choices of alphabet and word sizes are also considered.