Active control of combustion instability: theory and practice

One of the most successful applications of control technology in fluid systems is in the context of dynamic instability in continuous combustion systems. Models of combustion instability have been derived using both physically based and system-identification-based methods. Optimal, time-delay, and adaptive controllers have been designed using these models and demonstrated to lead to an order of magnitude improvement in a range of combustion rigs over empirically designed control methods. We present a survey of the existing theory that includes modeling and control of pressure instability in combustion systems and the practical applications of active control to date in small-, medium-, and large-scale combustion rigs.