PhD Student
380 INSCC
155 South, 1452 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-1114
Phone: 585-1249
Fax: 801-585-1456
E-mail:
chris.thurston[@]utah.edu
Office: 380 INSCC
Description of Work
Introduction: Recent sampling of combustion products from sour gas flares in Alberta, Canada have raised concern over the long standing assumption that flaring is an effective method of completely burning unwanted hydrocarbons and hydrogen sulfide. The Alberta Research Council as well as local industries and residence would like to answer some fundamental questions about the industrial practice. What is causing the flares in this area to perform so poorly? Is it the amount of hydrogen sulfide in the fuel? Is it the cold cross winds in the region? Is it the actual flaring conditions that the varying plants regularly practice? Given the expense and difficulty of gathering experimental data, simulations are emerging as a more appealing option for addressing these questions.
Simulation Science at the University: The C-SAFE program has allowed the University of Utah to develop code that simulates open flames. These codes have been designed to take full advantage of the supercomputers at government sponsored laboratories. They are massively parallel, scaling to thousands of processors. This computational power has made it possible to resolve the large eddies common to turbulent flow and flames.
Using large eddy simulation (LES) and the most advanced reaction mechanisms possible, I believe that we can capture adequate physics to accurately simulate the sour gas flares in Alberta and elsewhere for that matter. My goal is to be able to predict the products of combustion for geometrically simple, sour gas flares and to quantify the error associated with those predictions.
Some Preliminary Results: These photos show the capabilities of LES and advanced reaction models to capture the flame shape and product compositions. The flame shape has been rendered using soot volume fraction. The black and white photo shows the hydrogen sulfide concentration at the parts per million level. This particular flare has an hydrogen sulfide concentration of 11% by volume in the inlet and a diameter of 10.2 inches. The fuel exits the flare in the lower right corner at 13.2 m/s and the wind is from the right at 2.8 m/s.
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| Flame shape. | H2S concentration. |
