"Leveraging the Uintah Computational Framework for Commercial Simulation of Industrial Flares"

Advanced modeling and simulation software, such as the Uintah Computational Framework, has been developed in the US, in part, through significant funding by the Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. This software, as well as similar advanced simulation software, requires expert users and high performance computing systems to effectively utilize them, which has resulted in underutilization of these heavily funded tools. In this phase I program, the Uintah Computational Framework will be leveraged for commercial simulation of industrial flares on publicly available HPC facilities, making this high fidelity software available to flare operators and designers to improve combustion efficiency, and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and other toxic emissions. How this problem or situation is being addressed - The small business will collaborate with developers of the components of the Uintah Computational Framework to improve the accuracy of flare simulations. Leveraging the small business’ 26 year experience working with industrial clients to solve combustion related emissions and performance problems using high end simulation tools, the Uintah software will be hardened for efficient and accurate computational fluid dynamic simulations of industrial flares. The small business will make the Uintah Computational Framework available to industrial flare operators through a web based graphical user interface hosted by small business servers accessing commercially available high performance computing facilities in the US. What is to be done in Phase I? - In the phase I effort, the necessary components of the Uintah Computational Framework, including its Large Eddy Simulation based turbulence models, will be identified and ported to a commercial provider of high performance computing facilities in the US. The small business, in collaboration with the research institution, will simulate operation of a full- scale industrial flare, and will make comparisons with available data for the selected flare to demonstrate accuracy of the simulation over a time-frame and cost that is commercially feasible. In addition, the small business will develop and implement a graphical user interface for the Uintah Computational Framework to ease the setup, simulation, and post processing associated with its use. The small business will demonstrate a “software as a service” based approach through a web based specification of flare simulation inputs, high performance computing based simulation, and web based case monitoring and post processing of results. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits - The improved flare simulation capability commercialized in this project will provide more accurate information related to combustion efficiency and emissions from flares. The software as a service model that will be developed in this program for industrial flare simulations will also be used to make high performance computing available for designers and users of other combustion equipment to improve performance and reduce emissions in a more economical fashion than can be achieved through legacy simulation and experimentation alone.