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During the first quarter of 2005,
Fluent won three major R&D contracts from the U.S. Government. With a total sponsorship value of over $2.5 million, these three projects are expected to advance FLUENT’s ability to model advanced power plants, solid-oxide fuel cells, rocket engine turbopumps, and many similar applications. Together, these projects represent a sample of the kind of cutting-edge research that is being furthered by the continuing development of Fluent’s products.
Advanced Power Plant Simulation
In partnership with ALSTOM Power, Aspen Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, a Fluent-led team will be funded over three years by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) “Clean Coal” Initiative to further develop the Aspen Plus – FLUENT Integration Toolkit, which was begun under the earlier DOE Vision 21 program. The next-generation Toolkit will include both steady-state and dynamic simulation capability, which will allow the prediction of power generating capacity, thermodynamic efficiency, and pollutant emissions of advanced power plants by linking a hierarchy of plant-level and equipment-level models. The equipment-level models will include computationally efficient reduced-order models (ROMs), which will be based on information from high-fidelity CFD models. The simulators will also allow process designers to navigate through a 3D virtual reality representation of the power plant and visualize their results.
The project will be managed by the DOE Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) under the Coal and Power R&D program. Overall, the project will help support the DOE’s goal of developing a zero-emissions coal-fired power plant, along with government policy initiatives in energy, climate, and hydrogen, including the FutureGen power plant that is envisioned to be completed over the next decade. The resulting FLUENT software connectivity is already finding natural spin-off applications to chemical plants and other processes where system-level (or flowsheet) simulation needs to be selectively combined with CFD.
http://fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/cleancoal http://fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen
Multi-Scale Modeling for Electrochemical Systems
Spanning scales from nanometers to meters in electrochemical system simulation
Another recent award for Fluent is from the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR). As part of the ONR’s Research Tools Design Consortium for Modeling and Simulation, Fluent will research and develop electrochemistry and thermochemistry capabilities for the next-generation CFD solver and link chemistry models across multiple physical scales. Methods spanning quantum atomic chemistry, molecular dynamics, fundamental surface chemistry, and meso- and micro-scale CFD will be bridged together and demonstrated for solid-oxide fuel cells. This work will address the Navy’s broad need for advanced computational methods for studies of chemical reactions and charge transfer processes.
The principal task of the project will be to integrate Fluent’s solvers with the Cantera package. Cantera is open-source, object-oriented software developed at Caltech for problems involving chemically reacting flows, and is a very attractive mode for implementing chemistry and some thermodynamics into the next generation of Fluent’s software. A related task is to research methods for “homogenization”, the process of establishing effective properties and reaction rates for the large-scale CFD equations (which may involve a porous media representation of a fuel cell membrane-electrode assembly, for example) based on an understanding of the heterogeneous chemistry and surface transport at three-phase interfaces from a micron-scale model.
The project, which was begun in February 2005, will provide R&D funding to Fluent over the course of three years with the potential for a two-year extension period. Along with Caltech and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Fluent will act as a subcontractor to the Colorado School of Mines on this multi-scale modeling project, which at present is an active research topic.
www.cantera.org
Upper-Stage Engine Technology (USET) for Space Launch Vehicles
A typical liquid hydrogen pump impeller
Fluent was recently awarded a role on the USET program sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), as part of a team led by Northrop Grumman Space Technology. The team will create and validate software tools that will be used to design a new 40,000-pound thrust-class engine that uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as propellants.
This research is envisioned as the critical first step for a new upper-stage rocket engine designed to succeed the RL10 that has helped lift U.S. spacecraft into orbit for nearly 40 years. The five-year USET program, which targets significant risk and cost reductions for the next generation of expendable launch vehicles, will include design, fabrication, and testing of full-scale demonstration hardware, along with simulation tool validation and improvement.
Fluent’s role in this project is focused on CFD modeling of the cryogenic fuel flow through the hydrogen turbopump assembly. These devices typically operate at extreme internal conditions (e.g., 50 K, 300 atm) where hydrogen is a supercrit-ical fluid and transport properties exhibit unusual variations. The key challenge is to accurately predict high-head pump performance at design and off-design conditions. Fluent is collaborating with turbomachinery experts at Concepts NREC to improve FLUENT for this application. As one enhancement, the NIST Standard Reference Database 12 for pure fluid properties will be linked to the FLUENT material properties interface, in the same manner that the NIST refrigerant properties (REFPROP) database was linked for the real-gas model. Additional enhancements will also be considered involving the cavitation model and other turbomachinery features.
www.irconnect.com/noc/press/pages/news_releases.mhtml?d=51393 www.nist.gov/srd/nist12.htm
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