Combustion and Emissions Modeling

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Background

Modern transportation engines are designed to use the available fuel resources efficiently and minimize harmful emissions. Optimization of these designs is based on a wealth of practical design, construction and operating experiences, and use of modern testing facilities and sophisticated analyses of the combustion and related processes. Analytical and computational models for the combustion process require a detailed knowledge of the integrated response of fuel chemistry and the combustion process, and fluid dynamics and heat transfer within the fuel, fuel sprays, and the engine structure, validated against well-characterized experimental information.

Role of High-Performance Computing

Detailed models for fuel sprays and breakup, chemical reactions of the fuel constituents, fluid dynamics of the fuel mixture in the combustion chamber, and heat transfer within the fuel and to the combustion chamber boundary have been developed. These models often rely on first-principle models of the interacting phenomena, represented in a three-dimensional, time-dependent analysis framework. Solution of the equations representing these complex and strongly interacting phenomena relies on use of sophisticated engineering analysis software for describing the chemically reacting flow, and on large-scale computing resources for numerically solving the coupled set of equations that describes the evolution of the system.