Collaboration with AIST in Japan on efficiency improvement of a Micro Ceramic Gas Turbine combustor

The project aim is the need for better understanding of combustion processes in systems where the interaction between combustion and nearby solid surfaces has a large effect on efficiency and performance. Such systems are characterised by large surface-to -volume ratio and increased importance of the surface on the combustion process compared to conventional systems. This may be encountered in applications like e.g. micro gas turbines, membrane reactors and fuel-side of SOFC, all of which are emerging tech nologies in clean power production and distributed generation of power and heat. The project will be performed in collaboration with AIST in Japan. The research activities will specifically focus on improvement of the hydrogen and natural gas fuelled Micr o Ceramic Gas Turbine (MCGT) combustor. The gas turbine is part of a SOFC-Gas Turbine hybrid system being developed by AIST. Their activity on the MCGT has mainly been based on experimental investigations. A more fundamental understanding will as well nee d detailed mathematical modelling of the physics and chemistry together with numerical simulation tools (CFD) to run the models. This will be the work for SINTEF Energy Research and is intended to be performed by letting a SINTEF researcher have a Post-Do ctoral fellowship including guest researcher stay in Japan. Research tasks will be: * Characterisation of near-wall combustion processes: Challenges are related to a proper modelling of convective and radiative heat transfer, chemical kinetics, near-wall flame extinction and unburned fuel. These issues will be investigated by simplified numerical methods and by literature studies. In addition, the recent PhD work of the Post-Doc candidate on Direct Numerical Simulation of near-wall combustion will be a ba sis. * Improve existing CFD models on flame-wall interaction by using the results from the former task into an in-house CFD code. * Verification and analysis of models against experimental data from AIST