Main research areas

In the part institute of combustion technology, established research foci such as soot formation, combustion noise and combustion instabilities as well as applied combustion technology in stationary and aero gas turbines are further developed.

With regard to the orientation of the newly added research foci, the following background is essential:

• A socially dominant topic of the next decades will be the energy supply. The topics of renewable energies, alternative fuels, energy storage and energy efficiency, as well as precise controllability and intelligent networking will play a decisive role in its future development.
• Since alternative and regenerative energy sources will also be integrated into future processes in the manufacturing industry, the specific effects of their application, taking into account fluctuating availability, are an important topic. In this context, the demands on the quality of products, energy efficiency and, thus, also the requirements for the precise controllability of all processes will increase.
• For a guaranteed, continuous energy supply, the focus will be on systems engineering as a whole in particular. The tasks resulting from systems engineering can therefore only be handled in an interdisciplinary manner. This means that interdisciplinary collaborative research, especially with material sciences, will gain in importance.
• With regard to the problems to be expected in this way, experimental and numerical methods are of particular importance. In this context, increasing computer power will enable more accurate modelling and numerical simulation of increasingly complex and multiscale processes.

Against this background, the following research priorities will be pursued in the medium and long term for the field of combustion technology:

• Due to the expected change in the fuels used in the future, which will shift towards more hydrogen-rich as well as synthetic and biogenic components and weak gases, research topics in the field of characterization and combustion properties of hydrogen-containing, biogenic as well as synthetic, both, gaseous and liquid fuels and mixtures will gain further importance. For this purpose, ignition processes, flow and combustion instabilities, spray formation and the combustion of the novel liquid fuels, interactions between combustion processes and materials, as well as fundamental investigations of the flame structure on model flames are investigated.
• The combination of combustion processes with other processes such as thermoelectric, electrochemical (electrolysis, fuel cells), solar thermal and solar chemical processes will therefore be future research topics.