High Fidelity Simulation of Swirl Stabilized Combustor with a chocked outlet

The development of clean, sustainable energy systems is one of the grand challenges of our time. Most projections indicate that combustion-based energy conversion systems will remain the predominant approach for the majority of our energy usage. In the race to satisfy the competing objectives of high fuel efficiency and low emission of pollutants, combustion systems are being driven ever closer to the limit at which the combustion process becomes dangerously unstable, or produces unacceptable levels of noise.

Combustion instability and combustion noise emerge as grand challenges for societal and environmental problems. Combustion instability especially stands out as the single most important problem hindering the development of clean, robust combustion systems (Huang and Yang, 2009).

The central goal for the PhD studentship is to establish the state of the art in high-performance computational simulation. The project will create a new computational simulation tool for engineering research in systems involving turbulence, mixing and chemical reaction. Exploiting ongoing developments in supercomputing, the objective of this project is to use the new simulation tool to provide a comprehensive modelling and design approach that can eliminate instability and noise during the design of cleaner combustion systems.