Energy & Power Generation
Flow and heat transfer in turbines, boilers, heat exchangers and flue gas lines.
In energy equipment small efficiency differences translate into large sums. One per cent on a power plant component is a serious line in lifetime fuel cost.
What we work on
- Hydroelectric plants: spiral casing, guide vanes, runner and draft tube flow
- Steam and gas turbine stages
- Boilers and circulating fluidised bed systems
- Flue gas treatment: limestone slurry spray, tray column distribution
- Waste heat recovery and heat pipe heat exchangers
- Coal gasification and methane combustion
How a typical job runs
On a hydroelectric plant the spiral casing, guide vane and draft tube geometries are rebuilt from technical drawings, and the runner — for which no CAD usually exists — is captured by laser scanning. The whole plant is then combined into a single flow model and performance extracted across the operating range.
Technical notes for this field
- Heat distribution in boilers and reactors
- Wet steam and droplet erosion
- The limits of the Merkel method in cooling towers
- Combustion: is mixing the limit, or chemistry?
- Why is NOx prediction a separate job?
- Heat exchangers: where does ε-NTU end and CFD begin?
Related services
CFD Analysis
Internal and external flow, multiphase, combustion, turbomachinery. From incompressible to supersonic regimes; the approach is chosen to fit the problem.
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Conjugate heat transfer (CHT), transient regimes, radiation, thermal management. Temperature and thermal stress from component to system over the duty cycle.
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Aerodynamic heating, thermal protection system (TPS) and ablation modelling, plume interaction and base heating. Flight-phase thermal environments for high-speed vehicles.
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