Project Management and coordination

The overall objective of the coordination and management Work Package is the smooth realization of the project. The following specific objectives will be achieved:

• coordination and supervision of the research, monitoring and ensuring quality and timing of project deliverables;
• overall administrative and financial management and reporting of the project;
• management of the contacts with the EU Commission and establishment of effective internal and external communication;
• solution of possible conflicts;
• management of the data generated by the project (DMP);
• implementation of an effective dissemination and communication of the project’s results and interface with relevant stakeholders (industry, regulation bodies, society).

Engine and fuel specifications and preliminary design

The main objective of WP2 is to establish both a working dataset for the reference objects (aircraft and engine) and boundary conditions (mission conditions, chemical data, performance data) and analysis frameworks which will be adopted successively for the realisation of the virtual engine design as well as for the integration and validation of the reduced order models in the holistic prediction tool. A minimal-fidelity matching of the reference engine configuration with the model airframe will be carried out at this stage.

High-fidelity engine component design and pollutant emission assessment

The main objective of WP3 is to establish a virtual twin of the propulsion system to investigate the effects of fuel blend and provide thus the necessary physical insight to generate accurate reduced models for the engine. Particularly

1) Perform reacting LES of the baseline combustor tested in the LUND high-pressure combustion facility in Tasks 4.3 to 4.5 for the same fuels tested experimentally as well as for hydrogen at idle, cruise and take-off and landing conditions to provide detailed flow and combustion information as well as reciprocal validation of the experiments in Tasks 4.3 to 4.5

2) Computationally investigate different fuel injection and combustion stabilizing technologies in the combustor corresponding to the experimental investigations in Task 4.7

3) Investigate the effects of fuel changes on the cooling management requirements and performance of the HP-turbine.

Data-mining, hidden physics recognition

Conventional visualization and analysis tools have served us well for decades, but the access to huge amounts of accurate data facilitates new possibilities to create further understanding, not biased by existing knowledge, and extraction of hidden physics. The main objective of WP 4 is the discovery of hidden patterns and physical dependencies (hidden physics discovery) from the large amounts of data harvested from the virtual twins generated in WP3. This information will then be used in WP 5 to generate data-driven reduced-order models of the flexi-fuel engine completed by information on epistemic and stochastic uncertainties and confidence intervals.

Model-order reduction and engine component model integration

The objective to be pursued in WP5 is the generation of a predictive, data-driven, reduced-order model for a flexi-fuel engine. The analysis of enhanced ROM models uncertainty sources will also be performed. The response of the engine components is calculated using medium-high fidelity tools, which can be numerical simulations or experimental data from other work packages, and are used to estimate the free parameters of a reduced-order model in a data fusion process. The ROM model can be a simple Gappy-POD or, as in Task 5.1, a system of ODEs obtained with a Galerkin approach. The numerical high-fidelity or experimental data allows to build an estimate of the error of the new reduced model and determine the uncertainty margins and the sensitivity to the uncertain parameters of the model.

Combustion system validation tests

The main objective of this WP is to perform gas turbine combustion experiments in the LUND high-pressure combustion facility to study the feasibility of using a range of fuels for operating conditions corresponding to idle, cruise and take-off and landing, to provide validation data for high- and low-fidelity simulations to be performed in WP2 and to provide high-fidelity data to support hidden-physics extraction. The test facility is a modular system composed of an air supply unit with an electrical heater, a combustor and an afterburner-exhaust system. The combustor section has optical access and is connected to the laser diagnostic laboratory with access to laser equipment for various visualization and measurement techniques.

Predictive system model integration