Project Statement
Nitrogen oxide emission reduction systems are essential in helping industry meet the environmental requirements mandated by the 1995 Clear Air Act. The industrial participant in this project, Nalco Fuel Tech, is an industry leader in designing these systems. The key technology to the efficient design and operation of their system is accurate computational modeling of the combustion process using computational fluid dynamics and chemical kinetic models. Using the results of their models Nalco Fuel Tech offers it's customers a performance guarantee for the reduction of harmful emissions from commercial boilers and incinerators.
Interactive Virtual Reality Techniques
To improve the modeling capability of the Nalco Fuel Tech engineers we are pursuing two key technical issues relating to the computational simulations. The first is the use of interactive virtual reality techniques using the MCS CAVE to allow engineers to interact with and analyze the compuational data from within the visualization environment. There are several components to this work including
Scalable Unstructured Mesh Algorithms and Applications (SUMAA3d)
Secondly, we are working on the development of efficient, scalable unstructured mesh technologies and the related solvers for the numerical solution of the PDEs describing the combustion process. Unstructured mesh technologies are beneficial in two ways. First, the computational domain contains comples features with multiple length scales that are not suited for the regular computational meshes currently used. In addition, rapidly changing solutions can be much more accurately modeled with adaptive mesh techniques. Examples of such solution regions include areas of high concentrations of chemical species, modeling high temperature gradients, or examining small, critical features in boiler domains. At Argonne, we have developed the parallel algorithms and software necessary for the construction of unstructured tetrahedral meshes in the Scalable Unstructured Mesh Algorithms and Applications (SUMAA3d) project.