Bridging the gap between annular and can-annular acoustic spectra

In the literature on thermoacoustic instabilities in combustors, a distinction is typically made between annular and can-annular systems because these are the most common gas turbine architectures. In reality, however, annular combustors typically feature discretely symmetric elements, such as burner tubes, and can-annular combustors feature an azimuthally symmetric plenum at the turbine inlet. To better understand the general case in between the annular and can-annular extremes, we analyze the acoustic spectrum of an idealized can-annular combustion chamber with variable geometry, where the length of the axial gap distance beyond the ends of the cans-hence, the coupling strength-may be adjusted. For small gap sizes, the geometry approaches a set of isolated combustor cans, whereas for large gap sizes, it approaches that of pure annular systems. We present two theoretical models based on Bloch wave theory and validate them against finite-element simulations of the Helmholtz equation. We demonstrate that the azimuthal modes transform into the eigenmodes of an annular chamber as the gap is fully opened, and we show that below a certain frequency, all the modes in between the can-annular and annular limits can be classified by their axial and azimuthal mode orders.