Hydrogen Combustion

Design & simulation solutions for hydrogen combustion.

Hydrogen has large potential as a replacement for fossil fuels in the decarbonization of many industrial processes, however, its physical and chemical properties pose some unique challenges. Designing combustion chambers and burners that can handle the high diffusivity and low density of hydrogen is challenging, requiring modifications to traditional combustion systems to achieve stable and complete combustion. Managing the distinct properties of hydrogen, including its wide flammability range, low ignition energy, and high flame speed is a constant challenge. Accurate simulation is key to unlocking the potential of hydrogen combustion.

Gas Turbines

When designing gas turbines for hydrogen combustion it is critical to understand the performance of existing engine architectures for hydrogen blended fuels and pure hydrogen, as well as understand NOx emission characteristics of the engine with hydrogen-based fuels.

Ansys provides accurate high-fidelity combustion and turbulence models and fast meshing using state-of-the-art parallel and automated meshing methods to generate millions of high-quality poly-hexcore cells in minutes. This combined with the fast solve times achieved by the highly scalable CFD solver for faster design iterations greatly simplifies the complex task of simulating gas turbines.

Ansys can help designers understand combustion characteristics of hydrogen blended fuels and predict performance at engine operating and equivalence ratios. Simulation can also help to optimise engine design to maintain higher thermal efficiency and lower NOx.

Flame Flashback

To prevent flame flashback engineers must understand the onset conditions in pure hydrogen and hydrogen blended fuels. Evaluating and optimizing burner designs to avoid/arrest flashback is critical.

Ansys provides a wide range of turbulence models and allows the inclusion of large reaction mechanisms to accurately capture flashback and help to understand the combustion characteristics of pure hydrogen and hydrogen blended fuels and the scenarios causing flashback. Simulations can also inform best practices to aid in the safe operation of an engine/combustor.

Ammonia Combustion

One potential route to eliminating some of the transport issues with hydrogen is to convert it to ammonia and then reconvert some of it to hydrogen prior to combusting a NH₃/H₂ mixture. Ansys is actively involved in the development of models suitable for this purpose and validating them.

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