Descripción del proyecto
Principios de diseño para afrontar las inestabilidades de la combustión
Las industrias energética y aeronáutica dependen de las turbinas de gas, pero las inestabilidades de la combustión suponen un reto para el desarrollo de una nueva generación de turbinas de gas seguras y con bajas emisiones. El equipo del proyecto TACOS, financiado con fondos europeos, abordará esta cuestión con principios de diseño innovadores basados en la física y en los conocimientos teóricos más recientes. Se basará en el reciente descubrimiento por parte de la comunidad de la combustión de los puntos excepcionales (PE), que presentan propiedades físicas poco intuitivas muy adecuadas para controlar la estabilidad de la cámara de combustión. Los resultados preliminares demostraron que los PE pueden cambiar rápidamente la cámara de combustión de un estado inestable a otro estable y se pueden controlar mediante la acústica de la cámara y las características de la llama. En términos generales, con el proyecto se pretende abrir nuevas vías de investigación y permitir el desarrollo de turbinas de gas seguras y limpias.
Objetivo
"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."
Ámbito científico
- 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
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitución de acogida
10623 Berlin
Alemania