ERC HYROPE

Context and objectives

In response to the current climate emergency, energy systems must be renewed to achieve carbon-neutral operation in the coming decades. In this context, the increasing use of wind and solar sources in some countries destabilizes the electric grid because of their inherently intermittent nature. A possible mitigation of this problem is to use gas turbines which can compensate power fluctuations on-demand. A promising pathway to neutralize the carbon footprint of these turbines is to supply them with fuel blends of increasingly high fraction of zero-carbon fuels like hydrogen or ammonia. This strategy, however, raises fundamental issues due to the significantly different combustion and emission properties of these fuels compared to traditional hydrocarbons.

Hydrogen is extremely reactive and diffusive, and presents challenges such as violent flashbacks and intrinsic combustion instabilities. Ammonia, on the other hand, features an enhanced stability, but has a poor reactivity and must be operated at radically different thermochemical conditions. At conditions relevant for gas turbines (i.e., high-pressure and temperature), a comprehensive understanding of the behavior of the combustion of these fuels is still lacking.

The external page HYROPE ERC Synergy Grant (2024-2030, ID: 101119058) aims at filling this gap by understanding the combustion physics of hydrogen and ammonia at industrial experimental conditions. This will bring significant insight to accelerate the development of new generation combustion systems, unleashing the full potential of zero-carbon fuels for high-power gas turbines. Both fundamental experiments and numerical simulations will be used in synergy in order to fulfill these research objectives.

Scientific consortium

The HYROPE project relies on a collaboration between four scientific teams, each led by an international leader in their fields. The consortium includes:

• external page James Dawson’s team at NTNU (Trondheim, Norway), which is specialized in DNS simulations and experimental ammonia and hydrogen combustion.
• external page Andreas Dreizler’s team at TUD (Darmstadt, Germany), which is specialized in advanced optical diagnostics for combustion.
• external page Laurent Selle’s team at IMFT (Toulouse, France), which is specialized in DNS and LES simulations of hydrogen flames.
• Nicolas Noiray’s team at ETHZ (Zürich, Switzerland), which is specialized in numerical and experimental hydrogen combustion. 

Given our field of expertise, research activities at ETH in the CAPS laboratory will focus on hydrogen combustion by means of both LES simulations and state-of-the-art experiments in our fully operational high-pressure test rig Download Pele (PDF, 4.8 MB).