Numerical acoustic and flow simulations for clean energy systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Energy is critical to our standard of living and our economy, nevertheless, the goal is not only to produce energy but to produce "clean" energy.   The proposed objective of Prof. Paraschivoiu's research is to develop simulations tools that are used to improve the acceptance of new clean energy sources.  To be more specific, computational simulations of flow will be used to promote safety and trust in high pressure hydrogen storage and acoustic simulations will be developed to study the noise pollution from wind turbines.    The Hydrogen energy is increasingly attractive for the automotive industry but storing hydrogen and issues related to its safety remain. In the short term, high pressure reservoirs seem to be the first solution for hydrogen storage. For public acceptance, safety is the main concern and requires establishing codes and standards that minimize risk, in particular the risk of explosion if there is hydrogen release from the reservoir. To this end many scenarios need to be simulated and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the preferred tool to do this investigation. CFD is a numerical technique to simulate flows on complex geometries. Obviously, the solution accuracy is critical and is not available with the existing commercial packages for this problem. Prof. Paraschivoiu is developing new CFD tools for this application.  This proposal aims at studying the hydrogen jet as it exits the reservoir at sonic speeds as well as the hydrogen cloud that is formed.    Wind turbines produce a relative low level of noise but public opposition to this irritation is growing. To decrease the noise pollution, noise production as well as noise propagation must be studied. A significant research effort is dedicated to the noise production but very little work addresses the noise propagation. Prof. Paraschivoiu has experience on acoustic simulations and is proposing to develop a simulation tool to calculate the acoustic propagation of noise generated by wind turbines. This vibro-acoustic simulation code will include some of the state of the art technique for spatial approximations and solver acceleration that can also be used in the more general area of scientific computing.