Abstract

October 24, 2005
Title: THE ROLE OF SIMULATION IN UNDERSTANDING COMBUSTION
Presented by: John B. Bell Head, Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley, CA, 94720

Video Podcast

Combustion is one of our oldest and most important technologies and combustion of fossil fuels continues to provide most of the energy required for transportation and for stationary power generation in the U.S. In spite of its long history and technological importance, our knowledge of combustion processes is surprisingly incomplete. Although traditional scientific approaches based on theory and laboratory experiment have played essential roles in developing our current understanding of the combustion process, they are limited in how far they can take us. Computation, with its ability to deal with complexity and its unlimited access to data has the potential for augmenting theory and experiment to enable dramatic progress in combustion science.

To realize the potential of computational simulation requires the ability to perform highly accurate flame simulations and the ability to analyze and extract useful information from those simulations.

Estimates of the computational cost of such simulations suggest that standard simulation approaches would be prohibitively expensive. In this talk, we examine the specialized mathematical structure of combustion problems and discuss approaches to simulation that exploit this structure.

Using these ideas we can reduce computational cost by three to four orders of magnitude, making it is possible to perform high-fidelity simulations of realistic laboratory flames. We will illustrate this methodology by considering several examples and discuss how this type of simulation is changing the way researchers study combustion.