Dr. Jacqueline O’Connor has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant entitled, “CAREER: Impact of Turbulence on Mechanisms of Combustion Instability.” This proposal addresses the challenge of thermoacoustic combustion instability in combustion systems with highly turbulent flowfields. The proposed research is broadly applicable to gas turbines, rockets, industrial process furnaces, and boilers. In all of these systems, operational regimes exist where the system acoustics and flame heat release rate oscillations are mutually reinforcing through coupling of propagating flow and mixture disturbances. This coupling leads to disruptive combustion instabilities that can result in reduced operability, increased emissions, and in extreme situations, catastrophic failure of the combustion system, particularly in gas turbines. While significant steps have been made towards understanding and modeling these processes, our understanding is typically limited to low-turbulence level conditions, whereas the target applications for combustion instabilities are high-turbulence combustors. The goal of the proposed work is to understand the impact of turbulence on three critical components of the thermoacoustic feedback loop: the hydrodynamic instability of the flowfield that determines the susceptibility of the flow to external disturbances; the coupling mechanisms, either mixture or velocity disturbances, that drive heat release rate oscillations; and the mechanism by which these disturbances create heat release rate oscillations in non-flamelet flame structures. The results of this work will also feed into the development, implementation, and dissemination of case studies for undergraduate and graduate audiences. The case studies will focus on combustion-related issues, exposing a range of students to the importance of combustion in society; case studies will be disseminated through a network of early-career faculty through an online portal.