Industrial Flare Simulation

Using Large Eddy Simulation (LES)

Industrial flare simulation can provide important information on combustion efficiency, pollutant emissions, and operational parameter sensitivities for design or operation that can not be measured. These simulations provide information that may help design or operate flares so as to reduce or eliminate harmful pollutants and increase combustion efficiency.

Simulation of combustion using Large Eddy Simulations (LES) has made it possible to accurately simulate the complex combustion seen in these flares. Resolution of all length and time scales is not possible even for the largest supercomputers. LES gives a numerical technique which resolves the large length and time scales while using models for more homogenous smaller scales. By using LES, the combustion dynamics capture the puffing created by buoyancy in industrial flare simulation.

Over the past 10 years, the Institute for Clean and Secure Energy (ICSE) at the University of Utah has been developing a massively-parallel LES code (Arches), which is linearly scalable up to 4000 processors. Arches has been used successfully for analysis of a range of industrial flare applications.