Combustion model development for low-emission boilers

Creating efficient, low-emission boilers is the need of today and tomorrow, especially when talking in context of climate change. To achieve this for a burner-heat exchanger style boiler, it is required to understand the underlying phenomena that cause emissions. Thus, it is of interest to model combustion in such systems with complex designs. However, detailed combustion simulations require extensive computational resources and can cost a lot of time. To tackle this problem, we will use and further develop the Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) method. In the FGM method, the chemistry is simplified and tabulated, which results in an enormous reduction in computational cost when used in CFD simulations of complex boiler systems. This project focuses on improving the tabulation process and FGM usage to predict combustion emissions like CO and NOx and other design related parameters such as burner and heat exchanger temperature using conjugate heat transfer. This study will primarily focus on premixed laminar surface (burner) stabilized flames for methane-air mixtures but can be extended to hydrogen-air mixtures.

People involved in this project: Jeroen van Oijen