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Phd Proposal by Edwin Y. Goh

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Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
by

Edwin Y. Goh
Advisor: Professor Jerry Seitzman

“Reduced-Order Model for Prediction of Staged-Combustor NOx Emissions with Detailed Chemistry and Finite-Rate Mixing”

11:00 AM, May 2 2018, Wednesday
Montgomery Knight – Room 317

Abstract

Combined cycle power plants will play an essential role in the future of power generation. Their high cycle efficiencies are critical to ensuring a financially and environmentally sustainable path towards meeting rising global energy demands. Using state-of-the-art technologies, current power plants can achieve efficiencies of around 63%; thermodynamic cycle analysis shows that further efficiency gains are achievable primarily through higher combustor firing temperatures. However, the increased NOx emissions at such high temperatures with conventional combustor technology represents a major challenge. Consequently, there is a pressing need for novel approaches that enable elevated firing temperature and low emissions. The staged combustion architecture is one such concept that shows promise in the elevated-temperature/high-efficiency regime due to its enhanced emissions performance and operational flexibility.

Despite extensive research on staged combustion and the related jet-in-crossflow (JICF) problem, there is little published research regarding the impact of key staged combustor parameters on emissions and operability. The prohibitive cost of building prototypes hinders design space exploration, and the expensive computational methods used in a majority of the published research preclude their use in the preliminary design stage. While reduced-order models incorporating detailed chemistry have been utilized to study staged combustors, they were tailored to match the results and flow fields from test rigs of simple geometry in order to study specific aspects of the staged combustion problem.

The primary objective of this work is to examine and quantify the minimum NOx achievable by the staged combustion architecture, i.e. answer the question of what is the limit to which staged combustors can lower emissions. A reduced-order approach utilizing chemical reactor networks is proposed for the simulation of detailed NOx chemistry in a staged combustor. This model is developed not only for use in the rapid design cycle of staged combustors, but also for scientific explorations which elucidate the various interactions between NOx chemistry and mixing processes in a staged combustor. Because of the large parameter space and reactor networks involved, high-performance computing techniques will be employed to ensure good scalability across various computing architectures.

Committee Members:

  • Dr. Jerry Seitzman, School of Aerospace Engineering
  • Dr. Tim Lieuwen,    School of Aerospace Engineering
  • Dr. Brian German,  School of Aerospace Engineering
  • Dr. Tobin Isaac,       School of Computational Science and Engineering

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Created:04/26/2018
  • Modified By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Modified:04/26/2018

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