ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY

Turbulence-chemistry interaction in well characterized partially premixed and premixed laboratory-scale experiments has been investigated numerically by two different methods (M1 & M2) based on the large eddy simulation (LES) technique. It could be shown that the developed transported filtered density function method (M1) is capable of reproducing the turbulence chemistry interaction in the investigated opposed jet flame configurations. The flame resolved simulations (M2) revealed the importance of flame wrinkling and scalar geometry for flame propagation and allowed for further development of sub-filter models for future LES.

Using high resolution direct numerical simulations of a flow seeded with particles around a sphere, an international research team aimed at studying the hydrodynamic problem of collisions among particles in the potentially turbulent wake of a sphere. HPC system JUQUEEN of JSC served as computing platform for this challenging simulation project.

Two-phase flows with water droplets greatly affect the thermal-hydraulic behaviour in the containment of a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). In order to predict the local thermal-hydraulic behaviour in a real containment in the case of a severe accident, scientists of the University of Stuttgart generated a three-dimensional geometry of a model containment based on a German PWR. 

In order to develop economic, efficient, and reliable wind turbines, the knowledge of the mechanisms that evoke transient aerodynamic loads effecting blades, tower, and the nacelle is essential. Using high performance computing technologies, researchers of the University of Stuttgart used high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods to accurately predict these unsteady loads. Particular interest was paid on the interaction of wind turbine and atmospheric boundary layer.

Scientists of the University of Duisburg-Essen pushed further the state of the art by simulating large-scale coal and biomass flames in furnaces that have been studied in detail experimentally – the Instituto Superior Técnico and the Brigham Young University furnace. Within this project, the largest large eddy simulation (LES) of coal combustion ever to be computed provided high-resolution scalar profiles within the furnace, which allowed investigating the conditions that coal particles are subjected to in these applications and to compute particle combustion histories. LES is able to provide insights to the phenomena occurring in this type of application that are currently not available through experimental means.