The innovation proposed is a major capability upgrade to CRAFT Tech’s Multi-Time-Scale (MTS) Flamelet/Progress Variable (FPV) Software Toolkit (operational in NASA’s National Combustion Code, OpenNCC) to enable the on-demand generation of chemistry models targeting blends of conventional aviation fuels (CAF) such as Jet A and sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) that are directly usable in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses of gas turbine engine combustors. These on-demand chemistry models are envisioned to be inclusive of the underlying blend-specific soot precursor chemistry driving the formation of nonvolatile particle matter (nvPM). The quantification of nvPM/soot has recently gained significant traction due to its negative effects on global warming and public health. With the growing interest in replacing part of the CAF typically used with SAF to limit life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions and nvPM, the proposed innovation addresses key technical challenges currently preventing the routine application of high-fidelity computational design support tools to guide the selection of optimal SAF candidates and definition of optimal CAF-SAF blending ratios: (i) the limited availability of computationally-tractable chemical kinetic models for SAF blends and, even when available, (ii) their inherent complexity in terms of capturing the evolution of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) soot nucleate species needed when using higher-fidelity soot formation models. In order to attain the maximum level of dimensionality reduction, the MTS-FPV approach is leveraged by new tools to directly deploy large detailed kinetic models during the FPV table generation process and exploit time-scale separation for the fuel pyrolysis and the soot precursors. The significance of the innovation is that it addresses NASA’s core needs for an economically feasible and environmentally acceptable propulsion technology suitable for subsonic and supersonic commercial aircrafts.
This product addresses (i) NASA’s core needs for an economically feasible and environmentally acceptable Commercial Supersonic Transport propulsion technology, (ii) NASA ARMD needs for enabling safe and reliable operation of next-generation (N+3 and beyond) ultra low-emission conventional gas-turbine engine and hybrid electric aircraft propulsion, and (iii) core needs of NASA’s vision for next-generation aircraft systems with hybrid integrated wing/body systems with significant improvements in engine performance, emissions and noise reduction.
The commercial market includes the broad aerospace, power-generation and defense industry. Commercial aircraft gas turbine engines are the primary driver for this product. Other applications encompass power-generation turbines and IC/HCCI/diesel engines. DoD applications include gas-turbine engines, scramjets, RDEs, augmentors, UAVs propulsion systems and rocket engines