The team develops and tests methods for the simulation and optimization of reactive flows and flames in installations such as heavy-duty gas turbines, nanoparticle synthesis reactors, piston engines or biomass- and pulverised coal furnaces. Our methods allow for shortened development times to further reduce costs. Our research helps to develop cost-effective, flexible and safe systems which emit fewer pollutants.

The complex processes in synthesis reactors and combustors require a detailed numerical characterisation of reaction and transport processes. Their simulation provides insights into areas, which are inaccessible to experiments, enables the investigation and comprehension of isolated subprocesses, and their interactions, and helps to bridge the gap between lab and industrial scale. For this purpose we develop and implement numerical models and methods which are necessary to describe and simulate turbulent combustion of multiphase flows as well as reaction kinetics.

Our work is financed by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi), the Alliance for industrial research (AiF), national and international supercomputing centres as well as multiple private companies.

At the University of Duisburg-Essen, our group is closely linked with other groups at CeNIDE (Center for Nano-Integration Duisburg-Essen), CER.UDE (Center for Energy Research) and CCSS (Center for Computational Sciences and Simulation). As a menber of the IVG, we provide detailed simulation results and utilize data from the experiments of the other groups, which are essential for us.

The study at the chair imparts competences in the fields of flow simulation, in the description of reacting flows and in turbulence modeling.