Control of Thermoacoustic Oscillation by Microsecond Plasma Discharges

As a thermoacoustic phenomenon that is widely appear in combustion devices, thermoacoustic oscillation can drive or adversely affect the system. Active control of the thermoacoustic oscillations with actuators helps to control it in the desired direction, commonly used actuators include speakers, jets, fuel spray etc. Different from the conventional actuators, the microsecond plasma discharge has the characteristics of small size and large sound pressure. Its acoustic characteristic allow it to generate specific pressure wave during discharge, thereby controlling thermoacoustic oscillations, and thus can be used as a novel control method. In this paper, the Rijke tube is used as a model to derive formula under normal temperature and pressure, and time domain simulation is carried out in Simulink tool to find the appropriate active control scheme. Finally, the experiment was carried out, and the wire mesh in the Rijke tube was heated by an electromagnetic induction device to generate thermoacoustic oscillation without punching holes on the tube. Then based on the waveforms of simulation results, the high-voltage microsecond discharge is used for closed-loop control on the thermoacoustic oscillation and significantly suppressed the oscillation.