Project Details
Projekt
ENERGIZE: Adjoint-based and additive manufacturing-enabled optimization of hydrogen combustion systems
Applicants
Professor Dr.-Ing. Kilian Oberleithner; Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Oliver Paschereit; Professor Dr.-Ing. Michael Friedrich Zäh
Subject Area
Fluid Mechanics
Technical Thermodynamics
Primary Shaping and Reshaping Technology, Additive Manufacturing
Technical Thermodynamics
Primary Shaping and Reshaping Technology, Additive Manufacturing
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523881008
Green hydrogen combustion will play a key role in transition towards renewable energies. However, the combustion of hydrogen presents the gas turbine community with new significant challenges. Firstly, flame stabilization in the combustion chamber is incremental to safe operation of gas turbines, but state-of-the-art solutions used in natural gas combustors are not transferable to fuels with high hydrogen content. Secondly, the interaction of turbulent flow structures with hydrogen flame fronts is not well understood, due to the lack of experimental data and detailed numerical simulations. These turbulence-flame interactions are, however, of high relevance for practical configurations. On the one hand, it causes a corrugation of the flame sheet to allow for high global consumption rates. On the other hand, it leads to hot spot-induced NOx emissions, thermoacoustic instabilities and flame noise. A main challenge is therefore to control turbulence-flame interactions to balance these both positive and negative effects. To address these challenges and to overcome the existing barriers to hydrogen combustion in gas turbines, entirely new combustor designs must be developed. Until now, however, the design parameters of combustor have been significantly limited by the manufacturing restrictions of conventional cutting and casting techniques. In this context, the inclusion of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies in the development process can be a game changer. These technologies significantly widen the design parameter space, paving the way to manufacture designs completely detached from conventional constraints. However, using conventional experimental and numerical methods, it is impossible to develop a burner design that accounts for the immense degrees of freedom of AM. The key goal of ENERGIZE is to fundamentally improve combustor design processes by employing inverse model-based techniques for combustor design optimization under the physical and technical constraints imposed by hydrogen combustion. This inverse technique is based on the adjoint form of the governing mean field equations and allows for dramatic speed-up of the optimization process. In the ENERGIZE project this technique is developed to optimize a turbulent hydrogen jet flame with the objective to reduce flame flashback and NOx emissions via tailored flow control applications. These include porous media, surface roughness/smoothness and suction/blowing via microchannels. The approach is interdisciplinary combining model-based optimization and flow control, cutting-edge additive manufacturing, and experimental combustion diagnostics. This combined approach is expected to reveal fundamental insight into hydrogen combustion and will deliver an integrated framework for the development of new hydrogen combustion technology.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
