Massively parallel LES of azimuthal thermo-acoustic instabilities in annular gas turbines

Increasingly stringent regulations and the need to tackle rising fuel prices have placed great emphasis on the design of aeronautical gas turbines, which are unfortunately more and more prone to combustion instabilities. In the particular field of annular combustion chambers, these instabilities often take the form of azimuthal modes. To predict these modes, one must compute the full combustion chamber, which remained out of reach until very recently and the development of massively parallel computers. In this article, full annular Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of two helicopter combustors, which differ only on the swirlers' design, are performed. In both computations, LES captures self-established rotating azimuthal modes. However, the two cases exhibit different thermo-acoustic responses and the resulting limit-cycles are different. With the first design, a self-excited strong instability develops, leading to pulsating flames and local flashback. In the second case, the flames are much less affected by the azimuthal mode and remain stable, allowing an acceptable operation. Hence, this study highlights the potential of LES for discriminating injection system designs. To cite this article: P. Wolf et al., C. R. Mecanique 337 (2009).     

Association models for alcohol-water mixtures

Alcohol-water mixtures are often used as model systems for the study of hydrophobic interactions. In this respect, their thermodynamic properties are of particular interest since precise data are available over the whole miscibility range and they lend themselves readily to theoretical modelling. Three association models have been used to fit the volume data taken from the literature for aqueous methonol, ethanol and n-propanol at various temperatures. A simple micellization equilibrium explains the general trends but fails to fit the reduced excess volumes at both ends of the mole fraction scale. Better fits are obtained if interaction parameters are introduced, but these two parameters cannot easily be rationalized. A double association model (one for the alcohol and one for the water) gives the best fit and all the parameters have a physical significance. However, the parameters extracted, e.g. aggregation numbers, and their trends with temperature are not always realistic. Despite their limitations, these models illustrate well with the kind of avenues that can be explored to fit and interpret the experimental data of these complex systems.     

Blocking of coupling to the 0<Subscript>2</Subscript><Superscript>+</Superscript> excitation in <Superscript>154</Superscript>Gd by the [505]11/2<Superscript>-</Superscript> neutron in <Superscript>155</Superscript>Gd

The concept that the first excited 0⁺ states in N = 90 nuclei are not a b \beta -vibration but a second vacuum formed by the combination of the quadrupole pairing force and the low density of oblate orbitals near the Fermi surface is supported by the blocking of this collective mode in ¹⁵⁴Gd from coupling to the [505]11/2^- single-particle quasi-neutron orbital in ¹⁵⁵Gd . The coupling of this orbital to the 2⁺ g \gamma -vibration in ¹⁵⁴Gd is observed since this coupling is not Pauli-blocked.     

Representations of set-valued risk measures defined on the l-tensor product of Banach lattices

We obtain a representation for set-valued risk measures which are defined on the completed \(l\) -tensor product \(E\widetilde{\otimes }_l G\) of Banach lattices \(E\) and \(G\) . This representation extends known representations for set-valued risk measures defined on Bochner spaces \(L^p(\mathbb {P}, \mathbb {R}^d)\) of \(p\) -integrable functions with values in \(\mathbb {R}^d\) .     

Shear flows of a new class of power-law fluids

We consider the flow of a class of incompressible fluids which are constitutively defined by the symmetric part of the velocity gradient being a function, which can be non-monotone, of the deviator of the stress tensor. These models are generalizations of the stress power-law models introduced and studied by J. Málek, V. Pr??a, K.R. Rajagopal: Generalizations of the Navier-Stokes fluid from a new perspective. Int. J. Eng. Sci. 48 (2010), 1907–1924. We discuss a potential application of the new models and then consider some simple boundary-value problems, namely steady planar Couette and Poiseuille flows with no-slip and slip boundary conditions. We show that these problems can have more than one solution and that the multiplicity of the solutions depends on the values of the model parameters as well as the choice of boundary conditions.     

Measuring stress intensity factors with a camera: Integrated digital image correlation (I-DIC)Mesure de facteurs d'intensité des contraintes avec une caméra : corrélation d'images numériques intégrée (CINI)

A novel ‘integrated’ approach coupling image correlation and elastic displacement field identification provides a powerful and accurate tool to evaluate mode I and II stress intensity factors. This technique is applied to silicon carbide subjected to a sandwiched three-point bend test, using digital pictures obtained in optical microscopy where the pixel physical scale is about 2 μm. A crack whose maximum opening is 500 nm can be detected and its geometry identified. The toughness is determined well within a 10%uncertainty. To cite this article: F. Hild, S. Roux, C. R. Mecanique 334 (2006).