ABSTRACT
Gas turbine (GT) engines are widely used for aircraft and marine propulsion, electrical power generation, and fuel gas compression and distribution. There continues to be intensive industrial and academic interest in optimizing GT design and operation to increase fuel efficiency and to reduce pollution together with increased fuel flexibility under greater variable loads and ramp rate conditions. The operational temperature requirement is very restrictive on the material choice for the sensor head. Indeed, sensor solutions are restricted to passive optical devices that can be fabricated from super resistant materials such as sapphire and inconel. The interrogator is the optoelectronic readout unit that is connected to the sensor via a fiber optical cable. The availability of dynamic pressure data obtained directly from the GT compressor, combustors, and exhaust stages provides the potential to develop instrumentation to mitigate combustion instabilities caused by the interaction of fluctuating heat release of the combustion process with naturally occurring acoustic resonances.
