Interaction of Turbulence and Chemistry in Lean Premixed Laboratory Flames

The FutureGen power plant project, sponsored by DOE's Office of Fossil Energy, is a near-zero-emissions combustion device designed to produce hydrogen and other synfuels from the gasification of coal, and to sequester the carbon dioxide generated by the process. The fuels that result must then be burned in fuel-flexible combustion systems, such as high-pressure gas turbines. Engineering design of such systems presupposes a fundamental understanding of combustion instabilities for ultra-lean premixed systems that simply does not yet exist. This project will use INCITE resources for a computational study to enable a fundamental understanding and characterization of thermo-diffusively unstable flames in both atmospheric and high-pressure regimes relevant to ultra-lean turbulent premixed burners. These are the unstable flames that will be key in the development of near-zero-emissions combustion devices. The simulations will provide details that are not directly accessible by experiment, and will be used to validate experimental data interpretation and to extend theoretical models of turbulence-flame interaction to include critical aspects of these flames not currently addressed. This has significant ramifications for theoretical studies, engineering design models, and even for the processing of experimental diagnostics.