Postdoc position (F/M) : H2/air flame thermoacoustics in a dual swirled coaxial injector

Context: Switching from kerosene to hydrogen in aircraft engines necessitates a redesign of the engine. Manufacturers are actively exploring breakthrough technologies to develop new gas turbines that run on pure hydrogen. IMFT with his partners has developed different hydrogen injectors operating on partially premixed mode enabling the stabilization of H2/air flames across a broad operational range, ensuring safety and minimizing nitrogen oxide emissions. But hydrogen combustion systems are also prone to develop thermo-acoustic instabilities.

Objectives: The primary objective over the next two years is to enhance the original design of the burner to meet the specifications of future hydrogen aeronautical engines, addressing issues related to noise emission and combustion dynamics. In this context, IMFT and CERFACS have joined forces to tackle these challenges, with the candidate serving as the focal point at IMFT. The postdoctoral fellowship is conducted within the framework of the ERC SELECT-H project (European Research Council, Grant agreement 101097984). It aims at uncovering the physical mechanisms associated to low-frequency and high-frequency thermoacoustic instabilities in the hydrogen-powered combustor at IMFT and to develop tools for predicting their occurrence. The candidate will actively contribute to supervising the PhD students working on IMFT test facilities and collaborate with those responsible for numerical flow simulations of these phenomena. He should be proactive in making suggestions, developing his own ideas, and pursuing his own research path in thermo-acoustics.

Work program: The flame dynamics will be explored in an instrumented test bench with large optical access for laser diagnostics to characterize the flow dynamics and with acoustic sensors and acoustic actuators. The candidate will explore new techniques and diagnostics to force the flow and infer the flame response in the different frequency ranges of interest. He/she will participate to the experiments, propose new experiments and new postprocessing tools and make the link with theory and developing low order models of the observations made. The objective is to publish the work in the best international peer reviewed journals of the community and present it in national and international conferences.