LES SOFTWARE FOR THE DESIGN OF LOW EMISSION COMBUSTION SYSTEMS FOR VISION 21 PLANTS

Vision 21 combustion systems will require innovative low emission designs and low development costs if Vision 21 goals are to be realized. In this three-year project, an advanced computational software tool will be developed for the design of low emission combustion systems required for Vision 21 clean energy plants. The combustion Large Eddy Simulation (LES) software will be able to accurately simulate the highly transient nature of gaseous-fueled turbulent combustion so that innovative concepts can be assessed and developed with fewer high-cost experimental tests. During the first year, the project included the development and implementation of improved chemistry (reduced GRI mechanism), subgrid turbulence (localized dynamic), and subgrid combustion-turbulence interaction (Linear Eddy) models into the CFDACE+ code. University expertise (Georgia Tech and UC Berkeley) was utilized to help develop and implement these advanced submodels into the unstructured, parallel CFD flow solver, CFD-ACE+. Efficient numerical algorithms that rely on in situ look-up tables or artificial neural networks were implemented for chemistry calculations. In the second year, the combustion LES software was evaluated and validated using experimental data from lab-scale and industrial test configurations. This code testing (i.e., alpha testing) was performed by CFD Research Corporation's engineers. During the third year, six industrial and academic partners used the combustion LES code and exercised it on problems of their choice (i.e., beta testing). Final feedback and optimizations were then be implemented in the final release version of the combustion LES software that will be licensed to the general public. An additional one-year task was added for the fourth year of this program entitled, ''LES Simulations of SIMVAL Results''. For this task, CFDRC performed LES calculations of selected SIMVAL cases, and compared predictions with measurements. In addition to comparisons with NO{sub x} and CO exit measurements, comparisons were made to measured pressure oscillations. Possible gaps in the data sets were identified, as well as potential areas of improvement for combustion and turbulence models. Work in this seventeenth quarter (October-December 2004) consisted of writing the draft final report for review by DOE. The report was delivered to DOE in January, 2005