CONVERGE’s SAGE detailed chemistry solver enables you to simulate fuel switchover in a gas turbine combustor. Using clean-burning hydrogen in large power-producing gas turbines is an active area of research and development. A key challenge in the combustor design process is determining how to burn natural gas and hydrogen in various blends at specific operating conditions, while maintaining emissions compliance and avoiding damage due to hot-burning hydrogen. Many CFD codes rely on simplified combustion models; however, simplified models are not capable of simulating a variable blend of fuel compositions. CONVERGE features a fast detailed chemistry solver that is fully coupled to the flow solver and can accommodate any variation in fuel blends given an accurate fuel chemistry mechanism. In this simulation, a fully premixed combustor design is used to investigate the effects of a continuous change in fuel blend from methane to hydrogen at ultra-low NOx levels. The video shows two different views of the fuel switchover simulation. As you can see, the flame becomes shorter and more compact as the fuel transitions from methane to hydrogen, which will affect the combustor metal temperatures. The adiabatic flame temperature and combustor firing temperature remain constant during the fuel changeover process. CONVERGE’s Adaptive Mesh Refinement dynamically adjusts the mesh throughout the simulation to capture the changing flame front.
Convergent Science's CONVERGE is an innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the simulation process through autonomous meshing.
