Highly Scalable Large-eddy Simulations of Oxy-fuel Combustors for Direct-fired Supercritical CO2 Power Cycles

The safety, reliability and efficiency of direct-fired sCO2 cycles depend to a large extent upon the combustor performance. However, multi-scale interactions between turbulence and chemistry remain an unresolved issue in theoretical, experimental and numerical investigations of environments at supercritical pressures. This investigation aims to identify unjustified assumptions in existing models for turbulent combustion at supercritical conditions, identify the flame structure and combustion regimes associated with oxy-fuel combustors at supercritical conditions, develop low-dissipation numerical methods suitable for simulating supercritical flows with large density gradients while minimally dissipating turbulent eddies, and perform high fidelity large-eddy simulations of supercritical CO2 based combustors. The understanding, modeling, and numerical simulations from this investigation will help guide the design of next generation oxy-fueled combustors using supercritical CO2 that are currently in their infancy. Enabling the production of such a power system through high fidelity numerical simulations would lead to more efficient power generation with fewer emissions.