Project description
Design principles to tackle combustion instabilities
The energy and aviation industries rely on gas turbines, but combustion instabilities pose a challenge to developing a new generation of safe and low-emission gas turbines. The EU funded TACOS project will address this issue with innovative, physics-driven design principles based on the latest theoretical insights. It will draw upon the combustion community’s recent discovery of exceptional points (EPs), which exhibit counter-intuitive physical properties that are well-suited for controlling combustor stability. Preliminary results demonstrated that EPs can quickly shift the combustor from an unstable to a stable state and are controllable via the acoustics of the chamber and flame characteristics. Overall, the project aims to unlock new research avenues and enable the development of safe and clean gas turbines.
Objective
"Both, the energy and aviation sector rely on gas turbines, a combustion system continuously optimized since its invention during World War II. They constitute a main pillar for tomorrows energy and aviation mix to tackle climate change. However, fuel flexibility is stretched to its limits for conventional combustor designs: combustion instabilities hinder a new generation of safe and low-emission gas turbines. This calls for disruptive design approaches to enforce crucially needed step-change technologies. The overarching aim of TACOS is to break the bottleneck of combustion instabilities by novel, physics-driven design principles based on latest theoretical findings: the combustion community -including myself- has discovered ""exceptional points"" (EPs), which are known from theoretical physics to feature intriguing, counter-intuitive physical properties. Our preliminary results confirm that EPs (i) rapidly switch the combustor stability from unstable to stable and (ii) are well-controllable by both the acoustics of the chamber and the flame characteristics. TACOS takes a leap forward and exploits the unique properties of EPs for the conception of novel combustors by 3 objectives: (A) tailor the characteristics of both gaseous (land-based gas turbines) and spray flames (aeroengines) by carbon-free fuels (hydrogen+ammonia) and sustainable aviation fuels; (B) optimize simultaneously the emission rates and the stability of the combustion chamber by designing the combustor close to the EP; and (C) quantify the design robustness by experiments at atmospheric and high-pressure conditions to learn design principles by explainable machine learning methods. As a result, TACOS will not only produce an unprecedented, computer-aided and optimization-centric design software for safe, robust and clean gas turbines, but will also open a new research field on design principles and amplify fundamental breakthroughs in CI research."
Fields of science
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesacoustics
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physics
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
10623 Berlin
Germany