Title:	High Fidelity Numerical Simulation of Flow, Heat-Transfer and Combustion in Energy Related Fluid Mechanics
DNr:	NAISS 2025/3-19
Project Type:	NAISS Large
Principal Investigator:	Christer Fureby <christer.fureby@energy.lth.se>
Affiliation:	Lunds universitet
Duration:	2026-01-01 – 2027-01-01
Classification:	20306 20302 20304
Homepage:	http://www.energy.lth.se/english/
Keywords:

Abstract

Since the onset of the industrial era around 1850, global mean temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration have increased by approximately 1.0°C and 120 ppm, respectively—changes most plausibly attributed to anthropogenic emissions. As a result, climate change has emerged as one of the most pressing scientific and societal challenges of the 21st century. To significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate global warming, a transition away from fossil fuel dependency is essential. This involves improving the efficiency of energy conversion systems, expanding fuel flexibility to accommodate carbon-neutral alternatives, and developing advanced, high-performance technologies for sustainable energy conversion. Numerical simulations and experimental investigations are complementary tools for advancing the understanding, development, and optimization of energy conversion technologies. This project contributes to the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement by addressing challenges in hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as aviation and backup power generation. Our focus is on increasing the fuel flexibility of jet engines and gas turbines to support carbon-neutral fuels, and on evaluating the transformation, performance, and emissions characteristics of alternatives including hydrogen, HVO, SAF, and e-SAF. We also aim to deepen scientific understanding of dual-mode ramjet engines and rotating detonation engines, which are promising disruptive technologies for enabling broader hydrogen adoption in aviation and backup power. A third research area involves battery safety, which employs similar simulation and experimental methodologies and is critical for the safe deployment of electrified energy systems. The research group behind this proposal currently leads 12 active projects—including two competence centers, three EU-funded initiatives, and two network projects aimed at future excellence clusters—focused on energy conversion for aviation, power generation, electricity production, and thermal management. These projects have a combined budget of approximately 300 MSEK over the next four years and involve 31 researchers, 20 of whom specialize in computational methods development and analysis. Roughly one-third of the funding supports computational work. This research activity has evolved over the past five years to support the transition from today’s energy system to a more sustainable one, leveraging biofuels, hydrogen, wind and solar energy, improved thermo- and electro-chemical engines, and enhanced thermal management. This proposal centers on high-fidelity simulation of fluid mechanics and heat transfer in thermo-chemical and electro-chemical energy conversion processes. It addresses fundamental modeling challenges including turbulence, multiphase flow, spray dynamics, chemical kinetics, combustion, heat transfer, thermal radiation, fluid-structure interaction, and optimization. Several aspects of this research are also relevant to other industrial sectors such as pharmaceuticals and food processing. High-fidelity fluid dynamics simulations require accurate turbulence modeling and its interaction with heat transfer, spray, and combustion, which necessitate the use of large eddy simulation (LES) or direct numerical simulation (DNS). Proper resolution of flow and chemical scales is essential, leading to large computational meshes and long simulation times, often dominated by chemical kinetics. The simulation work will primarily utilize OpenFOAM, with substantial modifications to both physical modeling and numerical methods to enable more accurate and efficient simulations, particularly on Tier-0 and Tier-1 computing systems. Previous experience with SNIC resources has demonstrated good to excellent scalability.