Power System Development Facility
Transport Gasifier

It is important to be able to understand the solids distribution, temperature, flow characteristices, and chemical make up inside a transport gasifier. However, there is no affordable, reliable, and safe method for engineers to obtain this information. CFD and advanced visualization let engineers look inside a reactor to understand solids mixing, mass fraction of different gas and solid species, and temperature distribution. This ability to look inside a hot pressurized reactor in a virtual world can also be used to explore issues for scale-up, input changes, or different feed stocks at a fraction of the cost of actually performing an experiment.

The isosurfaces shown in these animations (produced by G. Foss, PSC) at different values represent different solids loading through the reactor. High isosurface values show more dilute regions in the reactor than lower isosurface values. In these animations the movies show dense region given by the isosurface of .85 and a more dilute region above this at an isosurface value of .94. By coloring these isosurfaces with different field variable e.g., mass fraction of CO or gas temperature, shows the variability of these quantities. The .94 isosurface colored with temperature shows cooler regions where the coal is being fed into the reactor and gives you an idea of how the coal heats up as it enters further into the reactor.

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