SDL Energy Conversion

In the foreseeable future, combustion will still meet the major part of the world’s primary energy demand, but technologies will need to change for low-carbon and carbon-free energy conversion, using synthetic fuels as key contributors. System redesigns will have to heavily rely on high-performance reactive CFD (rCFD) with sophisticated numerics and accurate predictive physical models.

However, combustion applications are particularly challenging with respect to HPC due to the strong non-linearities and the large ranges of scales arising from the highly-coupled turbulence and chemistry interaction, the large number of partial differential equations for a detailed description of the multiscale phenomena, and the inherent multi-physics aspects.

The SDL Energy Conversion aims to enable computationally efficient simulations of real-scale combustion devices by developing HPC-ready rCFD software and methods by a co-design process.

Current research topics:

• Data-driven combustion modeling for laminar and turbulent flames
• Data-driven turbulence modeling for Large Eddy Simulations
• Evaluation of chemical kinetics and transport properties on heterogeneous architectures
• Development of Fortran-Python interface for machine learning (ML) inference on CPUs in collaboration with CSG Parallelism and Performance
• Inference of ML-based combustion models using GPUs in collaboration with CSG Parallelism and Performance

Training offers 2024:

• Machine Learning in Combustion
• Parallelization in OpenFOAM for HPC Deployment
• Numerical Methods for Combustion

• Center of Excellence in Combustion (EuroHPC JU H2020)
• exaFOAM (EuroHPC JU H2020)
• CRC TRR 150
• CRC 129
• CRC 1194
• DFG FOR 2687

2024

• Influence of adversarial training for super-resolution models (Ludovico Nista, Heinz Pitsch, Christoph D. K. Schumann, Mathis Bode, Temistocle Grenga, Jonathan F. MacArt, Antonio Attili), Physics Review Fluids.
  

• Can flamelet manifolds capture the interactions of thermo-diffusive instabilities and turbulence in lean hydrogen flames? – An a-priori analysis (Hannes Böttler, Driss Kaddar, Jeremy Karpowski, Federica Ferraro, Arne Scholtissek, Hendrik Nicolai, Christian Hasse), International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.
• multiRegionFoam – A Unified Multiphysics Framework for Multi-Region Coupled Continuum-Physical Problems (Heba Alkafri, Constantin Habes, Mohammed Elwardi Fadeli, Steffen Hess, Steven B. Beale, Shidong Zhang, Hrvoje Jasak, Holger Marschall), arXiv preprint.