This month was the first month of working on the project. We started the month with a meeting with the 9 students who are all from the University of Strathclyde to discuss with Ari, the head of education at Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) and who oversees our exchange here in Finland, the three project topics and who would be doing what. All the groups were chosen by Ari and the supervisors at TUAS.
We were assigned the project title ‘Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) of Hydrogen Deflagration’ and our supervisor is Eero Immonen who specialises in CFD. The project was proposed to TUAS by Elomatic, an engineering consultancy in Turku so we are working with Bingzhi and Kenneth from the company for the whole duration of the project.
Deflagration is the rapid yet subsonic combustion of a substance, in our case Hydrogen.
We kicked off the project with a first meeting at Eero’s office at the Sepänkatu campus. He outlined the project for us and explained that we would be following research carried out in Project SUSANA, an EU funded project which created a CFD model evaluation protocol for the safe use of hydrogen. We would be simulating a chosen experiment from their validation database. We are to produce a technical report on our findings and present them to Eero and Elomatic once we have completed the project.
Eero suggested that we should ease ourselves into using ANSYS Fluent 19 R2 by trying some tutorials on methane combustion. Once we had successfully completed these we changed the species from methane to hydrogen:
We also had our first meeting at the Elomatic offices to discuss the project with Bingzhi and Kenneth. We decided that we would meet at Elomatic once a month to discuss project progress.
We started research for our literature review into hydrogen as a fuel, CFD methods, stoichiometry and Project SUSANA.
After a further meeting with Eero we made a simulation which was a simple rectangle with a circle of hydrogen and the rest of the geometry was filled with oxygen. This was a first and very basic attempt at simulating hydrogen deflagration.
We patched the circle with a temperature of 2000k and tried using the species transport model in ansys which was used in the previous methane tutorial.
This did not work very well as the temperature remained within the circle and became colder as time when on. We then experimented with different combustion models to try to get the simulation working.
After further meetings with Eero and emails to Bingzhi we chose our geometry which we would be simulating from the Project SUSANA database.
We are currently continuing to try to patch the hydrogen circle with this new geometry.
We recently had our first Skype meeting with Eero instead of meeting in person at his office. This was much more useful for us since Bingzhi could also be involved and we could screen share our progress. This will be the form of our meetings with Eero from this point forward.
Currently our main challenges are that we cannot access the Project SUSANA validation database for our chosen geometry therefore we do not have any validation data. Additionally, our simulation does not have an initial flow which can cause issues when using ANSYS. We are currently still investigating the different combustion models which ANSYS has to offer as our simulation is not behaving in a way which we would’ve expected.
We have created a rough Gantt chart for the plan of the project:
We have also carried out some personality tests on the team members so that we could determine our team roles and discuss our strengths and weaknesses. We have decided that Eilidh is project manager, Elise is risk and communications manager and Iain is technical lead and quality assurance.
Our immediate plan is to continue to test with the new geometry to try to get the simulation to work. We have created our basic initial mesh which will need to be refined in the future.We will also continue with our literature review research. We are currently preparing for our second meeting at Elomatic which will take place on October 1st.
~Eilidh~
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