In this 13-part series of articles, The Combustion Institute recognizes the 2021 Distinguished Papers selected from among the scientific papers presented during the 38th International Symposium on Combustion. Congratulations to Gianmarco Aversano, Marco Ferrarotti, and Alessandro Parente for winning the DPA in the Stationary Combustion Systems and Low Carbon Combustion Technologies colloquium.
In their paper, Digital twin of a combustion furnace operating in flameless conditions: reduced-order model development from CFD simulations, Aversano, Ferrarotti, and Parente further develop advanced combustion technologies in the industrial sector. In the global effort to reach carbon neutrality, the researchers acknowledge that while electrification is a key ingredient, energy-intensive industries will need to rely on fuels and combustion for many years to come. Therefore, carbon-free and carbon-neutral fuels must be implemented in these industries in order to reach the ambitious goals scientists have set in terms of energy efficiency, and the reduction of greenhouse gases/pollutant emissions.
Aversano, Ferrarotti, and Parente’s methodology couples expensive physics-based simulations with data-driven approaches, resulting in reduced-order models of complex systems. In order to minimize the pollutant emissions while keeping very high efficiency, they focused on a lab-scale furnace operating in a combustion regime known as flameless/MILD. By combining first principle simulations (computational fluid dynamics) with feature extraction and non-linear regression, they built a digital twin of the physical furnace that can be used to predict the status of the system in real time. This is an important step forward in the integration of machine learning in combustion research. In the long term, their development of robust digital twins of large industrial combustion assets are able to process heterogenous data streams (from simulation and experiments) for control, optimization, retrofitting, and new design.
Their research was motivated by the fact that scientists do not know the specific impacts (pollutant emissions; process efficiency) of a fuel/burner technology change on the combustion process taking place in large industrial furnaces. Furthermore, current computational tools do not offer the required predictivity, adaptivity, and computational efficiency to provide reliable answers to the “what if” scenarios that come with such a technological transformation. However, this information is critical to the implementation of major technological modifications in large industrial assets, for which experimental testing is neither comprehensive nor feasible at the scale of interest.
These findings continue to build environmentally friendly and non-polluting energy systems, thus contributing to the “Swiss knife” of resources required to reach carbon neutrality in energy-intensive industries. The implementation of digital twins can be beneficial both to retrofit existing conventional technologies and implement new combustion concepts in existing processes.
The impetus of this project resulted from the connections between different PhD projects on which Gianmarco Aversano and Marco Ferrarotti were working. The research took place at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in the Aero-Thermo-Mechanics Department, and in the Combustion and Robust Optimisation research group.
Over 1,700 papers were submitted to the 38th International Symposium on Combustion. All papers were categorized into one of 13 colloquia, and then distributed to colloquium coordinators and co-chairs. Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified individuals from a pool of over 1,000 peer scientific reviewers. Less than 50 percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation.
Following the symposium, one paper presented in each colloquium is awarded the distinction of Distinguished Paper. Visit here to view the presentation. The 13 Distinguished Papers undergo committee review for consideration for the Silver Combustion Medal. A paper selected for this honor exemplifies quality, achievement, and significance to advance a field of combustion science, and will be awarded during the 39th International Symposium in Vancouver, Canada.