Acoustic forcing on swirling flow: experiments and simulation

We investigated the effect of sound irradiated from loudspeakers on the flow of preheated air in the combustion chamber of a swirl burner. The temporally periodic pattern of the flow generated by the sound was detected by fast particle image velocimetry (PIV), with a repetition rate that was adapted to the observation of 12 phase angles of the irradiated monochromatic sound. The strong observed movement of the air is related to the movement by the sound itself, as determined by the pressure measurements with microphones. The PIV measurements reveal also a nonlinear interaction between the irradiated sound and the precession of the vortex core. The accuracy of the sound measurements was tested by determining in quiescent air the acoustic velocity by microphones and as well by PIV; good agreement was obtained thereby. Numerical calculations, using large eddy simulation and accounting for the sound forcing by variation in the mass flow at the inlet of the computational domain, approximately reproduce some of the experimental results.