Tools for the prediction of gas turbine combustion fuelled with synthetic fuels

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MTU Aero Engines, Germany's leading aircraft engine manufacturer, recognizes that, in order to secure a sustainable future for long-haul air transportation, it will be necessary to transition to bio-fuels; this will necessitate a sea-change in the design of future gas turbines to permit fuel flexibility. Much of the design of current gas turbine combustion chambers is based on prior knowledge; the models currently used in combustor design tend to be empirical in nature and are tuned based on the performance using fossil fuels. There is a clear need for improvements to these tools in such a way as to account for the effects of changing the fuel. The UBC combustion simulation group under Dr. Bushe offers an innovative alternative methodology, the Uniform Conditional State combustion model, which uses significantly less computational resources than other methods while providing significant improvement in the predictive capabilities. The new approach allows for a much wider range of fuels to be simulated and has been embedded in a free, open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics package that MTU uses in their simulations of gas turbine combustors.Further improvements to the modelling are needed to allow predictions of heat transfer to solid surfaces inside the combustion chamber and improved predictions of the emissions of pollutants. The aim of this project is to demonstrate that the tools under development can provide accurate predictions of pollutants and heat transfer for flames of jet fuel A in air, in addition to flames with alternative, low-sooting fuels such as methanol, DME and OMEs - fuels that can be made relatively easily from biological sources with a high yield, and, as such, may ultimately be produced sustainably. Working with MTU Aero Engines, Dr. Bushe and his students in the combustion simulation group at UBC will develop the needed improvements to - and validation of - these models so that the resulting computational tool will be useful for design for these next-generation fuels for jet propulsion.