Computational model for cleaner planes

A European research consortium has started the development of a numerical model that should reduce the CO2 emission of new airplane engines by fifty percent, and NOx emissions by eighty percent. Dr.ir. Jeroen van Oijen of the Combustion Technology group (Mechanical Engineering) is coordinator of the project that started in Eindhoven last Friday.

The project has been named DREAMCODE, an anagram for Development of Reliable Emission and Atomization Models for COmbustion DEsign. The project is part of CleanSky, a bigger European project that works on technological breakthroughs to meet the stricter environmental requirements. To that end, the EU has decided to unite the aviation industry and authoritative research institutes.

The institutes involved each have their own expertise in the field of modeling and combustion. TU/e was asked for its experience in developing efficient computational models of complex chemical combustion processes involving tens of thousands reactions between hundreds of chemical components. These processes require so much computational power that it’s impossible to use a model with that much detail to a simulation of an actual enging. TU/e has developed a method to simplify the chemical model so calculations can in fact be made without losing too much of their accuracy.

The project has a 1.3 million euro budget, 75 percent of which is funded by the European Union. Approximately five doctoral candidates will be working for DREAMCODE, one of which will be from TU/e.

(Source: TU/e Press Team)

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