Reaction Design Upgrades Energico™ for Use in Liquid Fueled Turbine Applications Aimed at Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Reaction Design, the clean technology chemistry leader, today announced that the latest release of Energico is bundled with detailed kinetic mechanisms for both gaseous and liquid fuels enabling substantially more accurate predictions of engine stability and emissions performance. Energico uses chemistry to accurately model combustion in a virtual environment, which helps identify ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to meet their clean tech goals.

  Present the results of a two-year liquid-fuel model-development program
At this week’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Turbo Expo presented by ASME International Gas Turbine Institute, Reaction Design’s Dr. Chitral Naik will present the results of a two-year liquid-fuel model-development program funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The project's key objective was to develop a comprehensive set of fundamental data on the combustion of alternative jet fuels, using a surrogate-fuel approach. Reaction Design, with experimental support from researchers at the University of Southern California, developed a detailed chemistry mechanism for Fischer-Tropsch fuels that are produced from hydrogen and carbon monoxide and be developed from either coal or biomass fuel stocks.

“The models created and validated in support of the NASA program can serve as surrogates for JET-A fuels used in aviation turbines” said Bernie Rosenthal, Reaction Design’s CEO. “Because we include the mechanisms with the software download, aviation engine designers can immediately begin to see the predictive accuracy benefits of using detailed chemistry with the new liquid-fuel enhancements in this release of Energico”.

Energico is a complex system-design simulation tool that works by applying detailed chemistry technology to solve the toughest gas-turbine engineering problems related to emissions reduction and stability. Other modeling tools such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software do not support the level of chemistry detail necessary to accurately predict pollutant emissions and stability effects such as lean blow-off, and are much more compute time- intensive.

“With previous releases of Energico, we included a detailed mechanism for natural gas that was validated across a wider range of environmental conditions than the popular GRI-Mech 3.0 mechanism,” said Scott Drennan, director of applications and services at Reaction Design. “The inclusion of a fully validated Fischer-Tropsch mechanism that can also be used as a surrogate for Jet-A and the additional enhancements made for the handling of liquid fuels, makes using Energico for aviation turbines both fast and accurate.”

Energico represents a multi-year, multi-million-dollar-technology investment by Reaction Design, and is inspired by the proven CHEMKIN combustion simulation package that was developed nearly thirty years ago at the Sandia National Laboratories. It is used by commercial and military gas turbine engine manufacturers to speed the integration of alternative fuels with their products and to create designs with reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

  Availability
Reaction Design’s Energico release 30101 with support for gas- and liquid-fueled turbine combustors and burners is scheduled for commercial release in August. For more information, please visit www.reactiondesign.com. For pricing information, please contact the Reaction Design sales team at 1-858-550-1920.

  About Reaction Design
Reaction Design, a San Diego-based software supplier, enables transportation manufacturers and energy companies to rapidly achieve their Clean Technology goals by automating the analysis of chemical processes via computer simulation and modeling solutions. Reaction Design is the exclusive developer and distributor of CHEMKIN, the de facto standard for modeling gas-phase and surface chemistry that provides engineers ultra-fast access to reliable answers that save time and money in the Development process.

Reaction Design also offers the CHEMKIN-CFD software package, which brings detailed kinetics modeling to other engineering applications, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) programs. Reaction Design’s world-class engineers, chemists and programmers have expertise that spans multi-scale engineering from the molecule to the production plant. Reaction Design serves more than 400 customers in the commercial, government and academic markets.