Oxy-coal combustion is one of the more promising technologies currently under development for addressing the issues associated with greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Oxy-coal combustion involves combusting the coal fuel in mixtures of pure oxygen and recycled flue gas (RFG) consisting of mainly carbon dioxide (CO2). As a consequence, many researchers and power plant designers have turned to CFD simulations for the study and design of new oxy-coal combustion power plants, as well as refitting existing air-coal combustion facilities to oxy-coal combustion operations. While CFD is a powerful tool that can provide a vast amount of information, the simulations themselves can be quite expensive in terms of computational resources and time investment. As a remedy, a reduced order model (ROM) for oxy-coal combustion has been developed to supplement the CFD simulations. With this model, it is possible to quickly estimate the average outlet temperature of combustion flue gases given a known set of mass flow rates of fuel and oxidant entering the power plant boiler as well as determine the required reactor inlet mass flow rates for a desired outlet temperature. Several cases have been examined with this model. The results compare quite favorably to full CFD simulation results.

This work presents a simplified methodology to couple the physics of a nanosecond pulsed discharge to the process of supersonic combustion in a flat wall combustor configuration. Plasma and supersonic combustion are separately simulated and then coupled by seeding plasma-generated radicals on the combustion domain. The plasma model is built assuming spatial uniformity and considering only the kinetic effects of the nanosecond pulsed discharge. Therefore, a zero-dimensional kinetic scheme accounting for the generation of plasma species is utilized. For the combustion model, the complete set of Favre-averaged compressible Navier Stokes equations along with finite rate chemistry is solved through a control-volume based technique via the commercial software Ansys Fluent. The computational results are compared against experimental studies showing that the proposed methodology can capture the main kinetic effects of the nanosecond pulsed discharge on supersonic combustion. OH concentration contours reveal the presence of an enhanced flame when the plasma is applied following the trends from experimental OH PLIF images. In addition, time evolving temperature and OH concentration contours show that the ignition delay time is reduced with the application of the discharge.

This paper presents a computational model along with a thermal comfort criterion aimed at assisting the design of operating rooms (ORs) from the perspective of meeting suitable flow patterns and thermal comfort conditions for the occupants. The computational model is based on the finite volume method (FVM) to describe the air inside ORs along with the human thermoregulation model implemented in virtual mannequins for thermal comfort. The air model considers turbulent fluid motion, species transport and the conservation of energy, including thermal radiation. The human thermoregulation model incorporates two interacting systems of thermoregulation. Namely, the passive system and the active system. The comfort criterion is based on the effective temperature of body parts which is a more suitable indicator than the commonly utilized predicted mean vote (PMV) and predicted percentage of dissatisfied (PPD) for body segments. The focus of the study is placed on the influence that the inlet thermal conditions provided by the air conditioning (AC) system have on the flow pattern and thermal comfort of the occupants. The results show that, for the selected conditions, lower air inlet temperatures than previously reported are required to operate at satisfactory comfort standards. It was also observed that smaller inlet temperatures bring about several improvements in the flow pattern inside the OR such as the size reduction of several recirculation zones (RZs). Nonetheless, smaller inlet temperatures bring about some drawbacks such as the size reduction of the ultra-clean ventilation (UCV) zone and the need of extra air-cooling power.