Early detection of thermoacoustic instabilities in a cryogenic rocket thrust chamber using combustion noise features and machine learning

We present a data-driven method for the early detection of thermoacoustic instabilities. Recurrence quantification analysis is used to calculate characteristic combustion features from short-length time series of dynamic pressure sensor data. Features like recurrence rate are used to train support vector machines to detect the onset of instability a few hundred milliseconds in advance. The performance of the proposed method is investigated on experimental data from a representative LOX/H-2 research thrust chamber. In most cases, the method is able to timely predict two types of thermoacoustic instabilities on test data not used for training. The results are compared with state-of-the-art early warning indicators. (C) 2021 Author(s).

Automated summary

A data-driven method for early detection of thermoacoustic instabilities is proposed and shows good performance on experimental data, comparing with state-of-the-art early warning indicators.