Solve Complex Combustion Challenges with CFD

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Combustion processes like burning coal for power generation or oil for home heating pose an assortment of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) challenges. To name a few, you need to control temperature distribution, predict air-fuel mixing, ensure combustion efficiency, understand the effects of hot gases on system casings and make systems comply with pollution regulations. Today’s Check it Out link takes you to a Web resource covering issues like these.

Called “Solving Complex Combustion Challenges — From Air-Fuel Mixing to Pollutant Emissions,” this resource focuses on ANSYS' range of CFD tools for applications relating to combustion. It's tutorial in nature, yet entertaining for anyone curious about the subject.

Right in the middle of the page is an eight-minute video providing a step-by-step demonstration of two analyses simulating events in an experimental combustor. The first analysis is a large eddy simulation of natural gas combustion and carbon monoxide pollutant emission prediction. The second simulates a lifted methane air jet flame in vitiated co-flow. Both simulations demonstrate that you can obtain the results to make accurate predictions of the combustion and flame dynamics by honing in on a few scalar areas of interest.

Next go to the bottom of the page where you'll find three links. Make sure to check out the cool images of hot things as you scroll by.

The first link, “Combustion Solutions for ANSYS,” sounds like — but is not — a product brochure. It is a four-page series of vignettes of industry solutions like non-premixed combustion; laminar combustion and stiff-chemistry systems; and liquid, solid and multiphase (fluid and solid) fuels. Great images, including the swirling effect on particles from a coal burner, the inside of a biomass furnace and a gas turbine combustion chamber.

Then click on the “Customer Who Uses ANSYS Technology” link to access a one-page article called “The Greening of Gas Burner Design.” It's about using simulation to adapt efficient, eco-friendly recuperative gas burners to tougher nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions regulations while maintaining high efficiency. It really wraps together everything on this Web resource.

This ANSYS Fluent screenshot shows a volume rendering of the temperatures around burner diffuser. Image courtesy of ANSYS Inc.

The last link goes to “Modeling Reacting Flows with ANSYS CFD,” an on-demand webinar. Click on it when time permits. It covers the basic concepts and reacting flow models available in ANSYS CFD.

“Solving Complex Combustion Challenges – From Air-Fuel Mixing to Pollutant Emissions” is a good place to get lost. Hit today’s Check it Out link and see for yourself.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Check out “Solving Complex Combustion Challenges — From Air-Fuel Mixing to Pollutant Emissions” here.