Symmetry-breaking induced exceptional points in the thermoacoustic spectrum of annular combustors

Many fluid flow configurations nominally contain symmetries, which are always imperfect in real systems. In this study, we reduce the degree of rotational symmetry and break the mirror symmetry of an annular combustor’s thermoacoustic model by using non-uniform flame response distributions. It is known that, in the linear regime, asymmetries lift the degeneracy of some azimuthal thermoacoustic eigenvalues, which are nominally degenerate in the symmetric case. In this work, we prove that a second asymmetric perturbation, which does not restore any trivial symmetry, can be exploited to create an exceptional point (EP). If the only source of asymmetry is the non-uniform distribution of flame responses, at this symmetry-breaking induced EP the single remaining eigenvector is a perfectly spinning mode. We demonstrate that symmetry-breaking induced EPs may be linearly unstable. For an EP obtained for vanishingly small asymmetric perturbations, the linearly stable/unstable nature of the EP follows that of the degenerate eigenvalue of the perfectly symmetric system. Our results are derived theoretically with a low-order model, and validated on a state-space model extracted from experimental data.