Scientific Improvement of Ammonia Combustion – SIAC

To reach the Green Deal objective of Europe in 2050, the need to keep a secure electricity supply, the energy storage will play an central role of the modern electricity smart grid. Hydrogen is considered as a good energy carrier even if actually suffers of the storage and transport cost and some safety issues. Ammonia, the nitrogeneous hydrogen is complementary to “Hydrogen Economy” with as main advantages its lower cost per unit of stored energy and its higher volumetric energy density. Nowadays, NH3 is mainly considered as a co-fuel of carbonaceous fuels in order to reduce the overall carbon footprint of applications (such as gas turbines, industrial furnaces or internal combustion engines) but it has to be also considered as a real carbon-free fuel. Due to its low flammability, most of the time the doping with H2 remains necessary. The lack of knowledge regarding the oxidation chemistry of NH3 and the combustion process (i.e. interaction with different tubulence levels) limits the optimization of the combustion of NH3 and the prediction of pollutant emissions (especially NOx and N2O). Therefore, the main objective of SIAC is to improve the fundamental knowledge of ammonia combustion alone or doped with H2 by using high-level of lab-scale experimental devices with optical techniques and to validate/provide accurate modelling tools through the experimental data, the kinetics mechanism with LES and DNS simulations. To address the future possibilities of NH3 as fuel to decrease the carbon footprint of any type of energy systems (internal combustion engine, gas turbine, burner), this proposal will provide new fundamental data to acquire a new step on the understanding and on the modelling of ammonia combustion in order to support design and optimization of energy converters with pure NH3, as fuel.