Academic Awards 2025 booklet

97 A Numerical Study of Single Iron Particle Combustion Currently, 80% of global energy relies on fossil fuels, contributing to climate change. There’s broad agreement on shifting to renewables like hydro, solar, and wind, However, these sources face challenges such as fluctuating production, seasonal mismatches, and geographic limitations in energy storage and transport. Iron powder is considered as a promising carbon-free, recyclable, compact, cost-effective, and widely available energy carrier. Iron powder, typically around 10–100 micrometers, can be burned to release heat, producing iron oxide. This oxide can be reduced back to iron using renewable energy, creating a closed, sustainable energy loop. Burning iron powder involves millions of particles. To design and improve real-world iron-fuel burners, it is crucial to understand the combustion behavior of these individual iron particles. In this dissertation, the key processes that govern the combustion of individual iron particles were investigated using advanced numerical models. We used models with different levels of detail and combining simulations on both nanometer (Figure 1) and micrometer (Figure 2) scales and compared results with experiments. Overall, the collective impact of the results has progressively enhanced our understanding of single iron particle combustion. Of course, there is still much to learn, and we have established directions for continuing this research. Figure 1: Configurations used to investigate the surface iterations between Fe-N 2 and Fe x O y - O 2 atoms. Nitrogen atoms are depicted in blue, oxygen atoms in red, and iron atoms in brown. Figure 2: Instantaneous contour plot of (upper) temperature [K] and (lower) oxygen molar fraction including the flow streamlines for a 50 μm particle with X O 2 = 0.21. x z y N 2 x y z O 2