The Institute of Thermodynamics of the Technical University of Munich and the Combustion Laboratory (UCICL) of the University of California Irvine have successfully applied for subsequent funding from the Bavaria California Technology Center (BaCaTeC). After the fruitful student exchange program in 2012, this subsequent project allows for Ph. D. student Aaron Endres to visit the Combustion Laboratory in Irvine as a research scholar in October 2018.
The goal of the project is to numerically investigate boundary layer flashback of turbulent hydrogen-air flames. After having successfully predicted the flashback limits of confined boundary layer flashback with open source software at the Institute of Thermodynamics, the same modelling approach will now applied to unconfined boundary layer flashback at gas turbine relevant conditions. In order to assess the applicability of commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to the prediction of boundary layer flashback limits, the CFD software Ansys Fluent will be used. The UCICL will provide the experimental validation data and the computational resources necessary to accomplish this task.