Better Combustion for Power Generation

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Validation of its high-fidelity model and the predictive accuracy of its new simulation methods are giving GE the ability to better integrate simulation directly into its product design cycle. "It's opened up our design space," Yan said. "We can look at all kinds of ideas we never thought about before. The number of designs we can evaluate has grown substantially."

Coupled with advancements in other aspects of gas turbine design, Citeno projects the end result will be a full percentage-point gain in efficiency. This is important to GE's and DOE's goal to produce a combined-cycle power plant that operates at 65 percent efficiency, a leap that translates to billions of dollars a year in fuel savings for customers. A 1 percent efficiency gain across the US combined-cycle fleet is estimated to save more than $11 billion in fuel over the next 20 years.

"The world desperately needs higher-efficiency gas turbines because the end result is millions of tons of carbon dioxide that's not going into the atmosphere," said Citeno, noting that in the last 2 years, more than 50 percent of gas turbines manufactured at GE's Greenville plant were exported to other countries. "The more efficient the technology becomes, the faster it gets adopted globally, which further helps to improve the world's carbon footprint."

Internally, GE's experience with the OLCF's world-class computing resources and expertise helps the company understand and evaluate the value of larger-scale high-performance computing, supporting the case for future investment in GE's in-house capabilities. "Access to OLCF systems allows us to see what's possible and de-risk our internal computing investment decisions," Citeno said. "We can show concrete examples to our leadership of how advanced modeling and simulation is driving new product development instead of hypothetical charts."

Building on its success using Titan, GE is continuing to develop its combustion simulation capabilities under a 2016 allocation awarded through the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge, or ALCC, program. As part of the project, GE's vendor partner Cascade is continuing to enhance its CHARLES code so that it can take advantage of Titan's GPU accelerators.

"A year ago these were gleam-in-the-eye calculations," Citeno said. "We wouldn't do them because we couldn't do them in a reasonable time frame to affect product design. Titan collapsed that, compressing our learning cycle by a factor of 10-plus and giving us answers in a month that would have taken a year with our own resources."

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