There is an urgent call for action to address the energy efficiency, climate, and local air quality concerns associated with transport because of CO2, particulates, nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrocarbons (HC) emissions. This has driven the international policy agenda towards reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) with a major emphasis on CO2 emission. Fossil fuel combustion is considered a main contributor to the emission of CO2. The transport sector with a particular emphasis on ground transport is considered the fastest growing sector among all emission sources. To meet climate change goals, governments around the world may need to implement strict regulations on the transport sector. Governments around the world have indeed set stricter emissions standards for vehicles as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector. These standards can be achieved through various methods, such as requiring more efficient engines, alternative fuels, or the adoption of electric vehicles. On the other hand, in recent years, a lot of effort was put into promotion of electric vehicles as zero emissions vehicles. This statement should be reconsidered, since the greenhouse impact of electrical vehicles is not negligible. Conversely, in some cases, an electrical vehicle can have an even higher emission impact than modern vehicles with sophisticated internal combustion engines. In fact, the pollutant emissions discharged at the tailpipe outlet will be so low as to be hardly measurable, and their practical impact on air quality will be negligible. In terms of particulate matter emission for example, the impact of tire and brake wearing is already much higher than that due to the ICE (tire wear produces around 50 mg/km of particulates), reaching values around 10 times the emission from the engine (5 mg/km). This implies that today’s conventional ICE-powered-car is equivalent to fully electric and hybrid cars with regard to particulate emissions, when tire and brake and other contributions (e.g. road dust) are accounted for. All the data indicate that ICEs will never cease to exist and the majority of cars will be powered by ICEs in the future. These factors sparked my work on the simulation of ICEs. The first project was mainly focused on high-pressure isobaric combustion, which is a promising concept that has the potential to introduce high efficiency. This work started with the development and validation of the computational models for full cycle combustion engine simulations to capture the flow and combustion characteristics and their interactions with the intake and exhaust flows through the valves and ports. The computational models were extensively validated against the optical engine experiment data, to ensure the fidelity needed for predictive simulations. Upon identifying the numerical models, a comparative study of isobaric and conventional diesel combustion was conducted. The results revealed the superiority of the isobaric combustion mode compared to the conventional diesel combustion especially at high load conditions. On the other hand, the isobaric combustion led to high soot levels compared to the conventional diesel combustion due to the undesirable spray-to-spray interactions resulting from a single central injector with multiple consecutive injections which introduced a fuel-rich zones. For the same injection technique, a study of the effect of injection pressure and the number of holes were numerically investigated as means to reduce the soot levels. To further decrease the soot emissions, multiple injector configurations were used and the results showed more than 50% drop in the soot levels and an increase in the indicated thermal efficiency due to the lower heat transfer losses. The successful injection strategies for low-emission isobaric combustion mode have further motivated research about fuel flexibility. The potential of using fuels from different sources with varying reactivity was explored by utilizing the high pressure combustion. Various primary reference fuels (PRFs) were employed at the same middle engine load, varying from PRF0 up to PRF100. Different injection methods from a single to four injections were studied. The results demonstrated that various PRFs showed significant discrepancies when using a single injection method, owing to the different fuel auto-ignition capability. On the other hand, excellent fuel flexibility was achieved by employing a small pilot injection, under this condition various fuels led to similar engine combustion performance and emissions. Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) was used as a way to reduce NOx emissions where 50% EGR was employed. To reduce soot emissions, various volume fractions of three shorter-chain alcohols (methanol, ethanol, and n-butanol) were blended with the baseline fuel (n-heptane). The methanol-blended fuels yielded the lowest soot emissions, but the worst fuel economy was obtained due to the highest heat transfer losses. By increasing the nozzle number and introducing an adequate amount of isochoric combustion, the fuel economy for pure methanol combustion was effectively promoted. The second project was focused on ultra-lean hydrogen combustion using CONVERGE CFD as computational framework. The problem of numerically detecting engine knock and the methods to mitigate such a problem were addressed. Different combustion modes such as port fuel injection spark ignition (PFI SI), homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI), and pre-chamber (PC) were investigated. The effects of the chemical mechanisms in terms of ignition delay time and laminar flame speed were studied. Starting with the simple combustion mode using PFI SI, high engine knock tendency was observed. The effects of compression ratio, air-fuel-ratio, and spark time were examined as means to reduce engine knock. Upon mitigating the engine knock issue, a comparative study of the PFI spark ignition and the PC modes was conducted. The results revealed that the current used design of the PC introduced high turbulence levels, which resulted in high heat transfer losses to the engine piston. In general , all of these studies (isobaric and hydrogen combustion) were aimed to increase the overall engine efficiency and reduce the emissions.

The Master’s thesis reviews the topic of hydrogen in within European and Czech energy industry. Hydrogen’s usage in gas industry, heating industry and power engineering may play a significant role in meeting European Union’s ambitious goals aiming to reduce emission production. This work identifies specifications of technologies used to produce, transport, and use of hydrogen and their impact on today’s energy systems and safety. The technical, economic, and political context is emphasized. The technical part covers the topic of injecting hydrogen into natural gas and it’s impact on physico-chemical properties of gas. The work analyses concentrations of 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 molar percent of hydrogen in real composition of natural gas measured on a handover point of transition system. Furthermore, calculations for these mixtures have been done to determine a change in characteristics of a heat exchanger. The results show, that with higher concentrations of hydrogen, the power of heat exchanger rises, while the power of a burner decreases due to lower calorific value of gas mixture. The last chapter follows up on a economical analysis of fuel and emission allowance costs for above-mentioned concentrations of hydrogen in gas mixture. Specific values of combined cycle gas plant Počerady from year 2019 were used for calculations. The results show, that in all of the three considered scenarios of emission allowance price predictions, replacing hydrogen with natural gas did not have a positive economic impact.

This thesis aims to contribute to the research and development of a new highly efficient split-cycle engine concept – the double compression-expansion engine (DCEE) – by expanding the knowledge of combustion processes suitable for this and, potentially, other modern engines, via experimental and computational studies. In this work, first, the importance of continued improvement of internal combustion engines is demonstrated by comparing the life-cycle CO2 emissions of different modes of transport, including walking and bicycling. Then, an isobaric combustion concept is proposed for use in modern high-pressure combustion engines, such as the DCEE. Isobaric combustion is compared to conventional diesel combustion at different pressure levels, fueling, and EGR rates, and shown to reduce cylinder wall heat transfer losses by 20 %, simultaneously improving the NOx emissions by a factor of two. An in-situ injection rate measurement technique is developed and applied to improve the understanding of the complex injection strategies required for isobaric combustion. It is also shown that isobaric combustion is possible to achieve with a single fuel injector, but using multiple injectors may offer additional benefits of even lower heat losses, better heat release control, and improved soot and NOx trade-off. Then, an alternative combustion system to the diesel isobaric is proposed – a hydrogen direct-injection (DI) compression-ignition (CI) combustion concept, which has the advantage of ideally eliminated CO2 and soot emissions. DICI H2 combustion is found to differ significantly from conventional diesel, most importantly, in terms of the injected and retained momentum, and in-cylinder flow patterns and fuel-air mixing. Thus, a completely different optimization path must be taken for H2 engines, which involves maximizing the free-jet mixing phase of combustion while minimizing the momentum-dominated global mixing phase. This is achieved computationally in this work by adapting the combustion chamber shape to the H2 jets and modifying the injector nozzle, which proved effective. Finally, hydrogen combustion is computationally compared to diesel in the context of the DCEE on the basis of thermodynamic system parameters and detailed energy breakdown, and proved superior. Brake thermal efficiencies in the range of 56 % are demonstrated for the entire DCEE powertrain fueled with hydrogen.

Internal combustion engines (ICEs) are essential for the welfare of today’s human civilization yet they contribute to almost 10% of the global CO2 emissions. Reducing the carbon footprint of the ICEs can be achieved by either increasing the engine efficiency to reduce fuel consumption or the utilization of carbon-neutral fuels. This dissertation aims to investigate the effect of the oxidizer composition on the efficiency and performance of the homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engine. It also aims to study the behavior of hydrogen in HCCI engines. The experiments are conducted using a Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine. The study also involves using chemical kinetics simulations to estimate the ignition delay time of hydrogen which is relevant to the HCCI mode of combustion. The results suggest that the specific heat ratio of the oxidizer does not significantly affect the HCCI engine efficiency. On the fuel side, hydrogen showed high sensitivity to engine running conditions due to the lack of negative temperature coefficient (NTC).

<p>Current industrial practice in the steel Industry involves the use of natural gas with high methane content as a primary energy source. Natural combustion produces greenhouse gases, and with the continued focus on managing and reducing harmful emissions from industrial processes, there is a need for research into alternative sources of energy. Among several alternatives that have been studied is hydrogen: a non-carbon-based fuel. This work uses a coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-finite element analysis (FEA) combustion model to investigate hydrogen utilization as a fuel in a reheat furnace and how it impacts the quality of the steel produced by understanding the three dimensional (3D) flow behavior, furnace temperature profile, thermal stress distribution, heat flux, formation of iron oxides, emission gases and mode of heat transfer onto the steel slabs. The modeling process integrates the five different zones of a pusher type reheating furnace (top and bottom) and modeled using Ansys Fluent 2020R1 and Ansys Workbench 2022R1. Changes in these parameters are determined by comparison to a baseline case that uses methane as fuel and maintaining the same heat input in terms of chemical energy into the furnace. Global mechanism was used for hydrogen and two step mechanism was used for methane combustion. Results revealed a 2.6% increase in average temperature to 1478K across the furnace for hydrogen which resulted in 6.45% increase in maximum heat flux into the slabs. Similar flue gas flow patterns were seen for both cases and heat transfer mode from the combustion gases to the slabs was primarily by radiation (~97%) for both methane and hydrogen. 11.5% increase in iron oxide formation on the slab was recorded for the hydrogen case, however, the bulk of the iron oxide formed was more of wüstites which are the easiest form of iron oxide to descale. However, elevated nitrogen oxide (NOx) levels were recorded for hydrogen combustion which led to further study into NOx mitigation techniques. Application of the staged combustion method using hydrogen fuel showed potentials for NOx reduction. The use of regenerative burners further conserved exergy losses in hydrogen fuel application. Insignificant deviation from base case thermal stress distribution and zero carbon emission from the hydrogen case indicates the usability of hydrogen as an alternative fuel in reheating furnace operations. </p>

A lot of research effort is spent worldwide in order to reduce the environmental impact of the transportation and power generation sector. To minimize the environmental pollution the role of hydrogen fuelled gas turbines is intensively discussed in several research scenarios, like the IGCC-technology or the application of hydrogen as large scale storage for renewable energy sources. The adaptation of the applied gas turbine combustion chamber technology and control technology is mandatory for a stable and secure low NOx operation of a hydrogen fuelled gas turbine.<p>The micromix combustion principle was invented at Aachen University of Applied Sciences and achieves a significant reduction of the NOx-emissions by the application of multi miniaturized diffusion-type flamelets. Based on the research experiences, gained during the two European hydrogen research programs EQHHPP and Cryoplane at Aachen University of Applied Sciences, the intention of this thesis was to continue the scientific research work on low NOx hydrogen fuelled gas turbines. This included the experimental characterization of the micromix combustion principle, the design of an improved combustion chamber, based on the micromix combustion principle, for industrial gas turbine applications and the improvement of the gas turbine’s control and metering technology.<p>The experimental characterization of the micromix combustion principle investigated the impact of several key parameters, which influence the formation of the NOx-emissions, and allows therefore the definition of boundary conditions and design laws, in which a low NOx operation of the micromix combustion principle is practicable. In addition the ability of the micromix combustion principle to operate at elevated energy densities up to 15 MW/(m2bar) was successfully demonstrated. The improved combustion chamber design concept includes the experiences gained during the experimental characterization and covers the industrial needs regarding scalability and manufacturability.<p>The optimization and testing is done with an Auxiliary Power Unit GTCP 36-300. The original kerosene fuelled gas turbine was modified for the hydrogen application. Therefore several hardware and software modifications were realized. The improved gas turbine’s control and metering technology enables stable and comparable operational characteristics as in kerosene reference. An improved hydrogen metering unit, which is controlled by the industrial Versatile Engine Control Box, was successfully implemented. <p>The combination of the micromix combustion technology and of the optimized control and metering technology allows a stable, secure and low NOx hydrogen fuelled gas turbine operation.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The growing need of mobile power sources with high energy density and the robustness to operate also in the harshest environmental surroundings lead to the idea of downscaling gas turbines to ì-scale. Classified as PowerMEMS devices, a couple of design attempts have emerged in the last decade. One of these attempts was the Belgian “PowerMEMS” design started back in 2003 and aiming towards a ì-scale gas turbine rated at 1 kW of electrical power output.<p>This PhD thesis presents the scientific evaluation and development history of different combustion chamber designs based upon the “PowerMEMS” design parameters. With hydrogen as chosen fuel, the non-premixed diffusive “micromix” concept was selected as combustion principle. Originally designed for full scale gas turbine applications in two different variants, consequently the microcombustor development had to start with the downscaling of these two principles towards ì-scale. Both principles have the advantage to be inherently safe against flashback, due to the non-premixed concept, which is an important issue even in this small scale application when burning hydrogen. By means of water analogy and CFD simulations the hydrogen injection system and the chamber geometry could be validated and optimized. Besides the specific design topics that emerged during the downscaling process of the chosen combustion concepts, the general difficulties of microcombustor design like e.g. high power density, low Reynolds numbers, short residence time, and manufacturing restrictions had to be tackled as well.<p>As full scale experimental test campaigns are still mandatory in the field of combustion research, extensive experimental testing of the different prototypes was performed. All test campaigns were conducted with a newly designed test rig in a combustion lab modified for microcombustion investigations, allowing testing of miniaturized combustors according to full engine requirements with regard to mass flow, inlet temperature, and chamber pressure. The main results regarding efficiency, equivalence ratio, and combustion temperature were obtained by evaluating the measured exhaust gas composition. Together with the performed ignition and extinction trials, the evaluation and analysis of the obtained test results leads to a full characterization of each tested prototype and delivered vital information about the possible operating regime in a later UMGT application. In addition to the stability and efficiency characteristics, another critical parameter in combustor research, the NOx emissions, was investigated and analyzed for the different combustor prototypes.<p>As an advancement of the initial downscaled micromix prototypes, the following microcombustor prototype was not only a combustion demonstrator any more, but already aimed for easy module integration into the real UMGT. With a further optimized combustion efficiency, it also featured an innovative recuperative cooling of the chamber walls and thus allowing an cost effective all stainless steel design.<p>Finally, a statement about the pros and cons of the different micromix combustion concepts and their correspondent combustor designs towards a possible ì-scale application could be given. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Treatment of fuel cell feed H2 for the removal of CO is important owing to the poisoning of the catalysts, thereby affecting the performance of the fuel cell. Strong and preferential adsorption of CO over the catalyst takes place resulting in a reduction of the power output of the cell. Therefore, it is important to treat the fuel cell feed H2 to reduce its CO content below the tolerable limit. Development of efficient catalysts for the treatment of synthesis gas for the removal of CO and and H2 enrichment of the gas to make it suitable for fuel cells is one of the two goals of this thesis. One of the various possible strategies for the removal of CO from the synthesis gas can be the use of the water-gas shift reaction. We have developed noble metal substituted ionic catalysts for catalyzing the water-gas shift reaction and have studied in detail the kinetics of the reactions by proposing the relevant reaction mechanisms. Solution combustion, a novel technique for synthesizing nanocrystalline materials, was used for the synthesis of all the catalysts. All the compounds synthesized were solid solutions of the noble metal ion and transition or rare earth metal oxide support. Three different supports were used, viz., CeO2, ZrO2 and TiO2. Substitution of Zr and Ti in CeO2 up to 15 at% was also carried out to obtain the compounds with enhanced oxygen storage capacity. All the compounds were characterized by X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. In some cases, where it was required, the use of FT-Raman spectroscopy was made for structural analysis. The compounds were nanocrystalline with metals substituted in ionic form in the support. The water-gas shift reaction was carried out over the synthesized catalysts with a reactant gas mixture that simulated the actual refinery gas composition. The variation of CO concentration with temperature was traced. The changes in the oxidation state of the metal showed the involvement of the various redox pairs over the reducible oxide like substituted CeO2 and TiO2. The mechanism of the reaction over ZrO2-based compounds was found to take place utilizing the surface hydroxyl groups. Rate expressions for the reactions over all the catalysts following different mechanisms were derived from the proposed elementary processes. Nonlinear regression was used for the estimation of various parameters describing the rate of reaction. Having established the high activity of Pt-ion substituted TiO 2 for the reactions, steam reforming of wood gas obtained from the gasification of Casuarina wood chips was carried out. The enrichment of the gas stream, which initially consisted of nearly 10% H 2 was carried out by steam reforming and H2-rich stream was obtained with H2 as high as 40% by volume in the treated gas. The second motive behind this thesis was to test the activity of the noble-metal substituted ionic catalysts for the treatment of the exhaust gas coming out of a fuel cell. In the fuel cell utilizing H2, the exhaust gases contain certain amount of unreacted H2, which can not be recovered or utilized economically. However, the gases are combustible and H 2 has to be removed in order to make the gas clean. We have shown high activity of the combustion-synthesized ionic compounds for catalytic combustion of H2. All the compounds showed high activity for H2 combustion and complete removal of H2 was possible. The rates were found to increase with an decrease in H2:O2 ratio and complete conversion of H2 was possible within 100 oC with air. A mathematical model was developed for the kinetics of catalytic H2 combustion based on the elementary processes that were proposed using the spectroscopic evidences. CO tolerant capacity of the catalysts was also tested. It was found that the temperature requirement for most of the catalysts increased with the introduction of CO. However, it was still possible to obtain complete conversions within 200 oC. To summarize, fuel cell processing systems utilizing H 2 remained central to the study. Treatment of the gases, both before and after reaction from the fuel cell was carried out over noble metal-substituted ionic catalyst, synthesized by solution combustion technique. Mechanisms of the reactions were proposed on the basis of spectroscopic evidences and the kinetic rate parameters were estimated using non-linear regression.

[pt] O presente trabalho tem por objetivo a realização de experimentos e simulações numéricas para estudar a interação da turbulência e da combustão em uma chama não pré-misturada de hidrogênio no ar estabilizada a jusante de um corpo rombudo. Para tanto, são utilizadas, simultaneamente, as técnicas de PIV, para a determinação de dois componentes da velocidade, e a técnica de PLIF para a determinação da intensidade de fluorecência do radical químico OH, que é um bom indicador da localização da frente de chama. São avaliados os métodos de pós processamento dos resultados do PIV com o intuito de maximizar a resolução espacial da técnica e ao mesmo tempo remover o maior número de vetores espúrios dos campos de velocidade instantâneos. Paralelamente, o queimador é modelado no software ANSYS/FLUENT e os resultados de simulação validados por comparação com os resultados experimentais. Modelos baseados nas médias de Reynolds são empregados para a caracterização da turbulência e o modelo de elementos de chama é adotado para a descrever a combustão. Os resultados experimentais indicam que, para as vazões de ar e hidrogênio adotadas, a combustão ocorre no regime de elementos de chama, onde a frente de chama apresenta algumas dobras, mas sem descontinuidades. Os resultados das simulações com combustão não obtiveram boa concordância com os resultados experimentais, indicando que a malha de cálculo precisa ser aprimorada. / [en] The aim of this work is to carry out experiments and numerical simulations to study the turbulence-combustion interaction in a nonpremixed hydrogen-air ame stabilized in a bluff body wake. For this purpose, are used a PIV technique for the determination of two velocity components and a PLIF technique to determine the uorescence intensity of the chemical species OH, which is a good indicator of the flame front location. PIV post-processing methods are evaluated in order to maximize the spatial resolution of the technique and to remove spurious instantaneous velocity vectors. In addition, the burner is modeled in ANSYS / FLUENT and the simulation results are validated by comparisons with the experimental results. Models based in the Reynolds avareges are used to characterize the turbulence and a flamelet model is adopted to describe combustion. The experimental results indicates that, for the ow rates of air and hydrogen adopted, combustion occurs in the flamelet regime, where the flame front is wrinkled, but without discontinuities. The reactive cases simulations did not agree with the experimental results, indicating that the computational mesh needs to be improved.

Combustion phenomena are complex in theory and expensive to test, analysis techniques<br>provide handles with which we may describe them. Just as simultaneous experimental tech-<br>niques provide complementary descriptions of flame behavior, one might assume that no<br>analysis technique for any kind of flame measurement would cover the full description of<br>the flame. To this end, the search continues for complementary descriptions of engineering<br>flames that capture enough information for the engine designer to make informed decisions.<br>The kinds of flames I have encountered are high pressure transverse jet flames issuing into a<br>vitiated crossflow which is itself generated from combustion of a gaseous fuel and oxidizer.<br>Summarizing the behavior of these flames has required my understanding of experimen-<br>tal techniques such as Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence of a reaction intermediate -OH,<br>Particle Image Velocimetry of a passive tracer in the flame and OH * chemiluminescence of<br>another reaction intermediate. The analysis tools applied to these measurements must reveal<br>as much information as is laden in these measurements.<br>In this work I have also used wavelet optical flow to track flow features in the visualization<br>of combustion intermediates using OH * chemiluminescence. There are many limitations to<br>the application of this technique to engineering flames especially due to the interpretation<br>of the data as a 2-D motion field in 3-D world. The interpretation of such motion fields<br>as generated by scalar fields is one subject matter discussed in this dissertation. Some<br>inferences from the topology of the ensuing velocity field has provided insight to the behavior<br>of reacting turbulent flows which appear attached to an injector in the mean field. It gives<br>some understanding to the robustness of the attachment mechanism when such flames are<br>located near walls.