The AFRC (American Flame Research Council) Autumn Symposium was held recently in Calgary, Canada on the 1-3 October 2024. I asked David Schalles, VP-Technical Services at Bloom Engineering and Chair of the AFRC, to give us some early feedback on the conference, specifically on the TOTeM part of this.

The symposium is held annually and this year included a half-day TOTeM meeting on the final day entitled ‘Green hydrogen: Advances in CFD Simulations of Industrial Hydrogen Flames’. The full agenda for the ToTEM is shown in the table and was highlighted by a keynote address given by Dr. Phil Smith, past Chairman of the AFRC and Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah. His subject was on validation of modelling utilising Bayesian statistical principles. Additional presentations in the ToTEM included talks on combustion models suitable for H2 and H2 blends, as well as a specific modelling project on a steel mill reheat furnace that will be tested on H2 under a USDOE funding grant.

The symposium had 75 registered attendees of which around 90% stayed on for the final day’s ToTEM. The panel discussion was lively, and set the stage for more future discussions and papers on this emerging topic.

Papers from the symposium will be publicly available on AFRC.net after a 6 month period, together with access to the back-catalogue of previous AFRC Symposium papers.

The event was part of the continued re-engagement between IFRF and the AFRC, where two AFRC members, Bloom Engineering and Messer, have re-joined as IFRF members for 2024. We hope to build on this in the future!