High-Fidelity Design Support Tool for Supercritical CO2 Oxy-Combustors

Direct fired supercritical CO2 (sCO2) cycles are gaining interest because of their potential as a zero emission power source that operates at high efficiency. The oxy-combustors in these systems operate at high supercritical pressures and current simulation tools to support design evaluation are deficient in this regime. Our proposed work here addresses this deficiency. The proposed program seeks to develop a validated, computationally-tractable design support tool based on high-fidelity CFD that can be used to predict oxy-combustor performance and optimize designs for direct fired supercritical CO2 (sCO2) cycles. In addition, this tool will permit modeling the effect of contaminants and their impact on combustor performance. The Phase I effort will address current deficiencies in the modeling of oxy-combustors which operate at high supercritical pressures (~300 bar) with large amounts of diluent CO2. The physics models that will be developed would include modeling combustion mechanisms with contaminants at the pressures as well as non-ideal thermodynamic properties of these mixtures. The models will be validated with an experimental test and subsequently will be implemented in efficient numerical framework for design support. The operation of the framework will be demonstrated on a baseline combustor design. The direct-fired CO2 Brayton cycle is gaining interest due to its potential for providing higher efficiencies than a steam Rankine cycle while also dramatically reducing emissions. Our proposed work here would provide a high-fidelity design tool that would permit faster development of optimal combustor designs as well as risk mitigation evaluations as these systems are scaled to full power levels.