LES SOFTWARE FOR THE DESIGN OF LOW EMISSION COMBUSTION SYSTEMS FOR VISION 21 PLANTS

Further development of a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) code for the design of advanced gaseous combustion systems is described in this second quarterly report. CFD Research Corporation (CFDRC) is developing the LES module within the parallel, unstructured solver included in the commercial CFD-ACE+ software. CFDRC has implemented and tested Smagorinsky and localized dynamic subgrid turbulence models on a 2.1 million cell DOE-NETL combustor case and a 400,000 cell nonreacting backstep case. Both cases showed good agreement between predicted and experimental results. The large DOE-NETL case results provided better agreement with the measured oscillation frequency than previous attempts because massive parallel computing (on a cluster of 24 pcs) allowed the entire computational domain, including the swirler vanes and fuel spokes, to be modeled. Subgrid chemistry models, including the conditional moment closure (CMC) and linear eddy model (LEM), are being tested and implemented. Reduced chemical mechanisms have been developed for emissions, ignition delay, extinction, and flame propagation using a computer automated reduction method (CARM). A 19-species natural gas mechanism, based on GRI2.11 and Miller-NO{sub x}, was shown to predict rich NO{sub x} emissions better than any previously published mechanisms. The ability to handle this mechanism in CFD-ACE+ was demonstrated by implementing operator splitting and a stiff ODE solver (DVODE). Efficient tabulation methods, including in situ adaptation and artificial neural nets, are being studied and will be implemented in the LES code. The LES combustion code development and testing is on schedule. Next quarter, initial results (including the DOE-NETL unstable combustor) with the CMC and LEM subgrid chemistry models will be completed and summarized