This is part one of a summer series on Department of Energy computational combustion research.
Computation fuels
combustion science
Posted August 4, 2009
Photo by Jacqueline McBride/LLNL
|
Global climate concerns, energy demand and air pollution worldwide are at all-time highs and have driven an unprecedented push toward clean-burning, high-efficiency internal combustion engines.
“Combustion dominates power production,” says Charles Westbrook (pictured above), who spent four decades at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) studying combustion’s intricate behavior. “Fossil fuels power 95 percent of our transportation, heat most of our homes and run most of our factories, and probably will for most of the next 100 years.”
Science has a responsibility to study combustion, to minimize its harm and maximize its efficiency, at least until better energy solutions emerge, says Westbrook, who is also president of the Combustion Institute, an international organization of engineers and scientists.
To explore the dynamic interplay of fire, fuel and air, Department of Energy national laboratory scientists are availing themselves of powerful supercomputers nimble enough to calculate how a flickering flame behaves at half a billion points in space.
In the past few decades, computation has become so critical to advancing combustion science that experimentation via simulation has become, as one of those researchers puts it, “the only game in town.”
Star struck
The physics of weapons motivated early simulations and “a whole generation of young lab hires in the late 1960s,” Westbrook says. But their work was highly classified and to get it published in physics journals, they reached for literal stars.
“Computational astrophysics in the 1960s through the 1980s was dominated by physicists from Livermore and Los Alamos (National Laboratory, or LANL) using astrophysics as a vehicle for publishing their work in weapons physics,” Westbrook says.
