Gas Turbine Engine Emissions and Noise Modeling

"The goal of the proposed Phase I/II project is to produce a unique computational tool for emission and noise prediction in gas turbine combustors of real world complexity by combining our Digital Physics technology based on Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM)pioneered by Exa Corporation for external flow/aeroacoustics applications with advanced, computationally efficient models of flame/turbulence/noise interaction developed by us in the past and validated for gas turbine combustors using research codes. Theproject will start with implementation of our unsteady flame propagation and emission models on the platform of Exa's commercial flow/acoustics simulator PowerFLOW that is already used worldwide for industrial design, optimization, and analysis. With thisplatform, the highest standards of numerical accuracy/efficiency, parallel scalability, and geometrical flexibility shall be naturally inherited. Upon optimizing this new numerical algorithm and benchmarking against prototype reacting flow data, we shallsimulate a full-scale gas turbine combustor problem. The goal here will be to resolve all the relevant hardware details and validate flowfields/emission data against experiment and our past studies, as well as analyze reacting flow sensitivity to both theinflow and design changes. If this proof-of-concept effort is successful, the goal of Phase II will be on well documented, full-scale combustor studies emphasizing minimization of emis