Quantification of the impact of uncertainties in operating conditions on the flame transfer function with nonintrusive polynomial chaos expansion

Nonintrusive polynomial chaos expansion (NIPCE) is used to quantify the impact of uncertainties in operating conditions on the flame transfer function (FTF) of a premixed laminar flame. NIPCE requires only a small number of system evaluations, so it can be applied in cases where a Monte Carlo simulation is unfeasible. We consider three uncertain operating parameters: inlet velocity, burner plate temperature, and equivalence ratio. The FTF is identified in terms of the finite impulse response (FIR) from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with broadband velocity excitation. NIPCE yields uncertainties in the FTF due to the uncertain operating conditions. For the chosen uncertain operating bounds, a second-order expansion is found to be sufficient to represent the resulting uncertainties in the FTF with good accuracy. The effect of each operating parameter on the FTF is studied using Sobol indices, i.e., a variance-based measure of sensitivity, which are computed from the NIPCE. It is observed that in the present case, uncertainties in the FIR as well as in the phase of the FTF are dominated by the equivalence-ratio uncertainty. For frequencies below 150 Hz, the uncertainty in the gain of the FTF is also attributable to the uncertainty in equivalence-ratio, but for higher frequencies, the uncertainties in velocity and temperature dominate. At last, we adopt the polynomial approximation of the output quantity, provided by the NIPCE method, for further uncertainty quantification (UQ) studies with modified input uncertainties.