Summary

The IFRF workshop on the topic of ‘From lab scale to industrial combustion: challenges for the scale up of experimental and simulation approaches’, was held on the 25^th April 2023 in Rouen, France. This was a ‘warm-up’ to the main 11^th European Combustion Meeting (ECM), hosted by the French Section of the Combustion Institute, on April 26^th-28^th 2023.

The workshop focused on the stationary industrial sectors of steel, glass, cement, power production, biomass and wastes as fuel, including 2 keynote presentations, It was well attended with 63 people from 11 countries joining, split 42 % / 58 % across industry and academia.

The presentations and posters from the event, together with an extensive selection of photographs and images are available to download below.

The workshop was summarised nicely in the closing address given by Anna Pubill Melsió from Air Liquide R&D and a member of the IFRF French Flame Committee. Anna thanked the audience for all of their posters covering a range of subjects including measurements, emissions production and ‘new’ fuels. She described these as being “very interesting and encouraging to see”, but noting also that “there is still a lot to be done”.

Anna also thanked Jörg Leicher of the Gas- und Wärme-Institut and Marianne Cuif-Sjostrand, of TotalEnergies, the keynote speakers of the day, for the quality and clarity of their presentations which gave and excellent base for the rich discussions that followed. She went on to say that “process and size matter and for each their purpose as well. You have seen the different processes from the primary industry where each one has its own characteristics and objectives. For size we have seen three scales: laboratory for well-defined phenomena, semi-industrial for crucial phenomena and industrial for what is found in real-life. To connect them we have simulation and modelling tools used to improve accuracy and reliability but also to push understanding, for quick improvement and easy to use for disruptive technologies as TotalEnergies has shown”.

“Size also triggers to work by phases and to define the right type of measurement or to be more flexible to adapt the measurements and qualifications because as we are in an energy transition phase, we need to speed up. Speed up because the request and regulations are coming faster but we are already working on mild combustion, flexible equipment which allow us larger trials and broader usages with several fuels, LES and RANS updates, big advances on optical measurements which are ready to be used at industrial size. And finally, what I have also seen today is that the experimental and numerical people are already discussing together, thus the uncertainty will decrease and we are taking the right path.”

Programme

09:30	Registration (Amphitheatre 250 A)
10:00	Welcome (Sébastien Caillat, IFRF Vice-President & David Honoré, CF IFRF Vice-President)
10:15	Session one, chair: Benoît Fiorina, CentraleSupelec
Keynote lecture	A matter of scale? – (Industrial) combustion research from the lab to real-life application, Jörg Leicher, GWI Essen
11:00	Break and poster session (Room 5, 1st floor)
12:15	Lunch
14:00	Session two, chair: Valerie Tschamber, Université de Haute-Alsace
Keynote lecture	Role of fluids numerical simulation (CFD) for the decarbonization of the industry, Marianne Cuif-Sjostrand, TotalEnergies
14:45	Workshop, interactive discussion (moderators: David Honoré – CNRS CORIA & Sébastien Caillat – Fives Stein)
	Specificities of industrial sectors (glass, boilers, gas turbines, steel, cement, flares...): furnace temperature, flame size, boundary conditions, flame confinement, fuels, burner technologies Semi-industrial pilot facilities and related measurement techniques Modelling and simulation of large industrial combustion systems Complementarity of lab-scale and large-scale studies (experimental and numerical) Abderahman Rabhiou (Honeywell) – Ahmad Sayed-Kassem (ArcelorMittal) – Anna-Maria Pubill-Melsio (Air Liquide) – Bénédicte Cuenot (Cerfacs) – Daniel Mira (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) – Gary Lu (Kent Univ.) – Giancarlo Sorrentino (CNR) – Joachim G. Wünning (WS) – Jörg Leicher (GWI Essen) – Jose Luis Andres (Fives Pillard) – Marianne Cuif-Sjostrand & Claude Prébendé (TotalEnergies) – Nico Schmitz (RWTH Aachen Univ.) – Nicolas Meynet (Crigen/Engie) – Thierry Schuller (IMFT) – Toufik Boushaki (CNRS Orléans)
16:30	Break and poster session - networking (Room 5, 1st floor)
17:20	Closing talk, Anna-Maria Pubill-Melsio, Air Liquide
17:30	End of the day

You can download the presentations and proceedings from the day here. 

You can see and download images from the day here.