This year's Annual Combustion and Turbines UTC Review was held at the RRD site in Dahlewitz. The event provided an excellent platform for teams to exchange insights into recent work across various RRD partner locations.

New publication at STFS

As a carbon-free energy carrier, there is a great requirement for exploring the fundamental and application aspects of iron combustion. Due to the non-volatile nature of its combustion, iron dust flame can propagate in a continuous (gas like) or a discrete (percolation wave) mode. The underlying heat and mass transfer mechanisms determine the mode and speed of the flame propagation. Such mechanisms depend on a wide variety of effects such as curvature, stretch, heat loss, polydispersity etc and their outcome could influence flame stabilization. This necessitates the usage of detailed boundary-layer resolved simulations for studying the essential physics in order to understand the problem.

From the coming summer semester 2024, the Institute Simulation of Reactive Thermo-Fluid Systems (STFS) will be offering the joint course „Decarbonization of Industrial Processes“ in cooperation with DLR for the first time. The lecture will take place at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and will be transmitted digitally and interactively for the module at TU Darmstadt.

Chemical reactor network modeling in the context of solid fuel combustion under oxy-fuel atmospheres

In our last news article, I discussed results from direct numerical simulation (DNS) resolving all scales in a very generic configuration. Here I would like to draw your attention to the other end of the spectrum – technically relevant scales.

First direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent ignition and combustion of micrometer-sized iron particle suspensions

I am very pleased that our first DNS paper on a turbulent iron flame has been accepted for publication in Flow, Turbulence and Combustion (Springer). This was a great collaboration of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Universität Stuttgart, Universität Bayreuth and the Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation.

Some first steps to understand the fascinating physics of the so-called discrete mode

I am extremely proud that we were able to make important progress. In two recent papers in Combustion and Flame, we have investigated the case of weak (part 1, small Péclet number) and strong convection effects (part 2, large Péclet number).

An important pathway for future climate-friendly aviation

Television report in the hr programme on our research into iron as an energy store broadcasted

Editor Rainer Terzo from the “Alles Wissen” team at Hessischer Rundfunk visited Clean Circles with a film crew in November to find out more about iron as a central component of the energy transition.

STFS researchers Hanna Reinhardt and Philipp Koob presented recent findings of our aero-engines group at the ASME Turbo Expo 2023 in Boston.

Flames are hot … well, not always

The STFS aero-engine thermoacoustics team Cetin Alanyalioglu and Hanna Reinhardt travelled to Zurich in September 2023 to network with the scientific acoustics community and to present the resent advances in processing of thermoacoustic data sets and hybrid, high-fidelity LES-CAA coupling.