Hydrogen Combustion in Industrial Furnaces (H2C4F)

The urgent need for decarbonisation of the steel manufacturing sector has made hydrogen-based technologies an important prospective element of the envisioned low-carbon energy systems. This transition is fundamental to reduce the carbon footprint and fossil fuel dependency in energy-intensive industries like the steel sector.

This radical shift in the fuel supply poses new challenges which are to be addressed before this technology can be implemented in existing plants.

This proposal studies the combustion dynamics, emissions and radiative heat transfer of a reheat furnace when switching from natural gas to hydrogen. The flames of the reheat furnace are characterised by large Reynolds numbers and flame lengths, furthermore the addition of hydrogen brings the challenges of preferential diffusion and changing radiative characteristics of the flame affecting heat transfer. Advanced modelling strategies are applied to correctly predict the flame dynamics in such challenging multiphysics problems entailing a large computational cost due to the problem size.

The use of computationally efficient techniques for turbulent combustion in the context of High-Performance Computing (HPC) is required in this case to obtain reliable predictions and cost-effective solutions of these industrial systems.