In spite of the increasing presence of renewable energy sources, fossil fuels will remain the primary supply of the world's energy needs for the upcoming future. Modern gas-turbine based systems represent one of the most efficient large-scale power generation technology currently available. Alongside this, gas-turbine power plants operate with very low emissions, have flexible operational characteristics and are able to utilize a broad range of fuels. It is expected that gas-turbine based plants will play an important role as an effective means of converting combustion energy in the future as well, because of the vast potential energy savings. The numerical approach to the design of complex systems such as gas-turbines has gained a continuous growth of interest in the last few decades. This because simulations are foreseen to provide a tremendous increase in the combustor efficiency, fuel-flexibility and quality over the next future. In this dissertation, an advanced turbulent combustion technique is implemented and progressively developed for the simulation of all the features that are typically observed in stationary gas-turbine combustion, including hydrogen as a fuel. The developed turbulent combustion model retains most of the accuracy of a detailed simulation while drastically reducing its computational time. As a result of this work, the advancement of power generation plants can be accelerated, paving the way for future developments of alternative fuel usage in a cleaner and more efficient combustion.

Explore a thorough overview of the current knowledge, developments and outstanding challenges in turbulent combustion and application.

Explore a thorough and up to date overview of the current knowledge, developments and outstanding challenges in turbulent combustion and application. The balance among various renewable and combustion technologies are surveyed, and numerical and experimental tools are discussed along with recent advances. Covers combustion of gaseous, liquid and solid fuels and subsonic and supersonic flows. This detailed insight into the turbulence-combustion coupling with turbulence and other physical aspects, shared by a number of the world leading experts in the field, makes this an excellent reference for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the field.

The combustion of fossil fuels remains a key technology for the foreseeable future. It is therefore important that we understand the mechanisms of combustion and, in particular, the role of turbulence within this process. Combustion always takes place within a turbulent flow field for two reasons: turbulence increases the mixing process and enhances combustion, but at the same time combustion releases heat which generates flow instability through buoyancy, thus enhancing the transition to turbulence. The four chapters of this book present a thorough introduction to the field of turbulent combustion. After an overview of modeling approaches, the three remaining chapters consider the three distinct cases of premixed, non-premixed, and partially premixed combustion, respectively. This book will be of value to researchers and students of engineering and applied mathematics by demonstrating the current theories of turbulent combustion within a unified presentation of the field.

With regard to both the environmental sustainability and operating efficiency demands, modern combustion research has to face two main objectives, the optimization of combustion efficiency and the reduction of pollutants. This book reports on the combustion research activities carried out within the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 568 “Flow and Combustion in Future Gas Turbine Combustion Chambers” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This aimed at designing a completely integrated modeling and numerical simulation of the occurring very complex, coupled and interacting physico-chemical processes, such as turbulent heat and mass transport, single or multi-phase flows phenomena, chemical reactions/combustion and radiation, able to support the development of advanced gas turbine chamber concepts

Turbulent combustion sits at the interface of two important nonlinear, multiscale phenomena: chemistry and turbulence. Its study is extremely timely in view of the need to develop new combustion technologies in order to address challenges associated with climate change, energy source uncertainty, and air pollution. Despite the fact that modeling of turbulent combustion is a subject that has been researched for a number of years, its complexity implies that key issues are still eluding, and a theoretical description that is accurate enough to make turbulent combustion models rigorous and quantitative for industrial use is still lacking. In this book, prominent experts review most of the available approaches in modeling turbulent combustion, with particular focus on the exploding increase in computational resources that has allowed the simulation of increasingly detailed phenomena. The relevant algorithms are presented, the theoretical methods are explained, and various application examples are given. The book is intended for a relatively broad audience, including seasoned researchers and graduate students in engineering, applied mathematics and computational science, engine designers and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) practitioners, scientists at funding agencies, and anyone wishing to understand the state-of-the-art and the future directions of this scientifically challenging and practically important field.

Coal, still used to generate more than half of the electric power in the U.S., will likely be part of any future global energy plan. But this finite resource is also responsible for 80 percent of the CO2 emissions from power production, and its continued use will require improved processing techniques that are less damaging to the environment and l