Numerical Framework for Modeling Fully Resolved and Coupled Combustion Processes of Iron Particles in Air

Iron powder combustion can be utilized as a carbon dioxide emission free solution for energy storage and production. Nevertheless, design of efficient iron-Air combustors requires advanced numerical tools and fundamental understanding of all the associated physical phenomena. In the current work, we present two independent solvers: 1) our in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver, Athena-RFX++, which includes an originally developed Immersed Boundary Method (IBM), and 2) a zero-dimensional numerical solver for single iron particle combustion processes, which takes into account the underlying physical mechanisms, such as diffusion processes and reaction rates. These two solvers are fully coupled into a newly developed numerical framework. Then, we conduct high-fidelity numerical simulations of a reacting iron particle in air. We demonstrate that, for a single iron particle, the coupled solver can be utilized to predict the time-dependent flow field in the surrounding air and the particle s thermal history.