Hello, A new project on the LCRC cluster has been requested. Please forward the information on to the LCRC Allocation sub-committee. Applicant's name: Kaushik Saha Applicant's institution: ANL Applicant's division: Energy Systems Project Name: Denso_simulations Project title: Numerical Investigation of Effectiveness of Enriched Nitrogen and Oxygen Using Air Separation Membranes for Internal Combustion Engines Associated funding: WFO for Denso Corporation Other Systems: Science: Developing an efficient internal combustion engine, as well as complying with ever-stricter emission regulations has been the objective of the industry for the past few decades. These ever evolving challenges have resulted in the introduction of enabling technologies like High Pressure Common Rail (HPCR), Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), Miller Cams etc. NOx emissions pose risk to human health. Evidently, EPA stringently regulates the levels periodically to negate this risk. The current NOx reduction technologies include EGR, three-way catalyst at stoichiometric operation (lower efficiency), and Lean burn (challenges with ignition and still might require after-treatment). EGR, although commonly used currently, is fraught with drawbacks: unwanted exhaust species introduced into the engine contaminates oil, early piston failures, and wear; clogging of EGR coolers used for cooling EGR; poor utilization of intake charge. Maintenance costs skyrocket wit h EGR usage compared to lean burn engines. Utilization of Air Separation Membranes (ASM) reduces NOx emissions. Intake air flows through thousands of thin, hollow fibers coated with a polymeric material. The fibers selectively permeate O2 molecules through the walls while N2 molecules flow through the fibers resulting in N2 and O2 enriched air. Nitrogen Enriched Air (NEA) is used in the intake system to reduce NOx emissions. There can be extensive heat loss through the walls of the combustion chamber. To prevent that, shrouding the combustion zone with layers of inert gas such as Nitrogen (donut combustion), could be beneficial. To develop these Nitrogen and Oxygen rich areas ASMs can be used. In order to realize the effectiveness of these ASMs for improving combustion efficiency and reducing NOx emissions, extensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can provide favorable insight for design optimization for the combustion chamber, injection manifold, and intake and exhaust systems. Project description: With the use of parallel processing and highly-scalable CFD solvers, industry and scientific community have made remarkable progress towards the development of modern engine technologies. Argonne National Laboratory has demonstrated ASM technology on various engine platforms ranging from a passenger car to a locomotive research engine. It also has a suite of patents using this technology. In order to expand the benefits of ASMs by utilizing both enriched streams sequentially in a combustion cycle, we propose to explore new combustion concepts by partnering with DENSO. The objective of this project is to develop an intake system for an engine which can, through an innovative design, utilize both the nitrogen-rich and oxygen-rich streams produced by an ASM. To this end, high performance computing (HPC) resources, engine testing facilities, and staff expertise will be used from Argonne. Activities will include: Model development using CONVERGE to study the oxygen and nitrogen rich pockets within an engine combustion chamber, flow characteristics, gas introduction methods and evaluating optimal conditions/settings for best engine performance. The CFD team for engine research at Argonne has been in the forefront of nozzle flow, spray, and combustion research for the last 5 years. They work directly with the software developers to enhance the codes used to model flow and combustion in engines using supercomputer and HPC clusters to solve complex problems in short order. Full 360˚ computational geometry needs to be considered for these proof-of-concept simulations. Zone wise initializations will be done by putting Oxygen at the core and Nitrogen as the surrounding layer. At the initial stage closed cycle and non-combusting simulations will be performed to understand the diffusion process under the influence of piston movement and get estimates of diffusion time-scales for various parametric cases. With more understanding of the diffusion processes, simulations will involve fuel injection and combustion with the focus on evaluating NOx emission reduction and combustion efficiency (considering minimization of wall hea t transfer losses etc.). Since the focus is to identify optimum settings on the gas cloud distribution, several parametric simulations will be performed. Some of these envisaged parametric investigations are noted below: (1) the influence of the swirl induced flow on the gas cloud distribution will be investigated, (2) the influence of engine speed on the results will be investigated since at low speeds due to high residence times, the cloud distribution is expected to be homogeneous while at high engine speeds due to low residence times the cloud distribution may be very heterogeneous, (3) the influence of injection timing and location of O2 on the overall gas cloud distribution will be investigated, (4) Although the conceptual design shows a flat piston head, the influence of a shaped bowl on the gas cloud distribution will be investigated, (5) since diffusion of gases may be governed by temperature gradients also, the influence of heated and cooled gas injections on the gas cloud formation will b e investigated. Overall, it is expected that more than 100 simulations will be performed based on a design of experiments (DoE) approach and the results will be documented. For combustion cases, several design constraints with regards to the location of a diesel fuel injector on the cylinder head and the N2 and O2 ports etc. will need to be optimized. The specific methods used for the multi-phase, reacting flow simulations with moving boundaries will include: 1) Finite volume schemes 2) RANS turbulence models 3) CONVERGE software is being used - 2 base and unlimited child licenses available Industry partnership: DENSO Corporation Project URL: Requested allocation: 1600000 Q1: 400000 Q2: 400000 Q3: 400000 Q4: 400000 Justification: more than 70% scaling up to 128 processors Storage requirements: 1 TB The requester has used undetermined amount hours of their initial startup project. In addition to approving an initial amount, please specify a Category and Subcategory for this project. For a list of the current selection of approved categories, please see: https://wiki.lcrc.anl.gov/wiki/Processes/Categories Once the Allocation committee has approved the project, please go to the Project Management page to create it: https://accounts.lcrc.anl.gov/projects.php Thank You, The LCRC Accounts System