This project is a joint effort between Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that will develop large scale computations for aviation combustors running with Synthetic Aviation Fuels (SATFs). These simulations will be used to predict particulate emission formation in aircraft engines running on new fuels and investigate the performance and flame stability for these fuels in novel combustor designs, including lean premixed prevaporized combustors and trapped vortex combustors. A simulation pipeline will be established from simulations of a lab scale experiment at SNL used to validate models for the formation of particulate emissions to full combustor scale simulations in collaboration with industry and academic partners. High-performance computing capability through the ALCC program are essential in enabling simulations of configurations that are of interest to industry. The simulations will focus on Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA), a novel fuel that must be blended with additives containing aromatic compounds to meet fuel certification requirements, to understand how these additives affect particulate formation and flame stability relative to conventional fuels. 

Synthetic aviation fuels derived from biological feedstocks or electricity-driven processes provide an additional domestic source of fuel for the civil and defense aerospace industries. Therefore, developing and commercializing new synthetic fuels is well aligned with national energy priorities like increasing domestic energy production, maintaining energy security, keeping energy prices low/stable, and supporting economic growth in the agriculture sector. However, due to rigorous certification requirements to ensure safety, the cost of testing requirements can be a prohibitive risk for novel fuel production pathways. Aircraft engine combustor simulations can be used to predict performance based on properties measured with a small quantity of fuel to screen fuel candidates and de-risk scale-up, so the capabilities and new insight into new fuels and combustor designs developed in this work will help to hasten deployment of these technologies.