Developing computational tools to simulate hydrogen-burning aeroengines

One of the hardest sectors to decarbonize is aviation. Any carbon-free alternative to jet fuel must produce a similar amount of thrust while remaining lightweight.

One promising solution is hydrogen, which can be burned in a similar manner to jet fuel. However, designing hydrogen aeroengines can be challenging, in part because hydrogen possesses many properties that are difficult to simulate computationally.

Federico Ghioldi and Federico Piscaglia developed a computational framework for simulating hydrogen-air burners, augmenting the open-source computational fluid dynamics platform OpenFOAM with multiple proprietary custom libraries.

The researchers built efficient methods for the GPU-accelerated direct integration of finite-rate chemistry to couple to an in-house implementation of the dynamic thickened flame combustion model for Large Eddy Simulations (LES). They enhanced these simulations by correcting for mixture-averaged viscosity and conductivity, generalizing to include multicomponent diffusion and strong differential diffusion, and accounting for fluid-solid heat transfer interactions.

With these enhancements, the authors were able to simulate both anchored and lifted flame regimes in the Hydrogen Low NO_X (HYLON) burner, a hydrogen-air burner at the Institute de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, achieving good agreement with experimental data.

They hope their tools will drive progress in the field of aeronautical propulsion.

“This framework is a reliable tool to investigate flame stabilization, pollutant formation, and safety concerns in hydrogen-fueled aero-engines,” said Ghioldi. “By validating against the well-documented HYLON burner, we establish a foundation for applying these methods to more complex combustor designs and operating conditions.”

They plan to continue working on their framework, expanding its capability to high-pressure conditions and including plasma-assisted ignition models, with the goal of eventually supporting full-scale aeroengine combustors.

Source: “Accelerated combustion simulations of hydrogen-air flames in the hylon burner,” by Federico Ghioldi and Federico Piscaglia, Physics of Fluids (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0284278 .