Strong market forces are dramatically transforming the way we approach electric power generation in the United States and around the world. Efforts to deregulate electric power industries are leading to tremendous new opportunities and challenges alike.
The emerging power generation marketplace is driving power producers to search for innovative strategies to maximize returns and stay ahead of the competition. Increasingly stringent environmental regulations are forcing coal-fired unit operators to consider a myriad of emissions control options, each with its own unique costs and benefits, to maintain compliance in the most efficient manner.
In the United States, concerns over pollutant emissions and a growing energy demand are also contributing to a renewed interest in the economic viability of the nuclear power sector. At the same time, technological advances, most notably the increased efficiency and reliability of combustion turbines in combined-cycle and co-generation systems, are playing critical roles in reshaping the power generation landscape.
With utilities under greater financial, competitive, and regulatory pressure than ever before, many have found CFD, or computational fluid dynamics, to be an important tool for profitably generating cleaner, more efficient, and reliable power in today's competitive electric power market.
The key ingredient to CFD's value in the power generation market has been its ability to significantly reduce the time and expense involved in designing power generation equipment, troubleshooting equipment in the field, retrofitting equipment, and investigating safety-related Òwhat ifÓ scenarios. Traditionally, physical scale models and prototypes, along with simple rules of thumb and empirical correlations, have been the engineer's main tools. In many cases, CFD models can be built and analyzed at a fraction of the effort required for physical testing, saving time and money and allowing for additional investigation and design optimization.
The flow model of a draft tube was part of a study at a Hydro-Quebec plant.
In the process of producing electric power, engineers often deal with a variety of inhospitable environments, from the fireball of a T-fired boiler to the potential hazards of a nuclear waste storage accident. CFD modeling is a nonintrusive tool that can provide insights into fluid flow problems that would be too costly or physically prohibitive to explore by experimental techniques alone. The insight and understanding that are gained from CFD simulations give added confidence to design proposals at reduced risk, avoiding the need to design by oversizing and overspecification.
Advances in the field of CFD are fueling greater use and productivity of flow modeling software in the electric power industry. Enhanced CAD import features, fully unstructured meshing technologies, and automated meshing tools have significantly reduced the time required for mesh generation. These tools enable CFD users to produce higher-quality meshes, more robust simulations, and more accurate solutions. More intuitive graphical user interfaces have replaced text menus at all stages of the CFD process, and today's postprocessing tools make analyzing results more insightful than ever.
Dramatic improvements in computer hardware performance, at lower costs, combined with the introduction of parallel processing and load sharing technologies, have dramatically reduced turnaround times for model simulations. These technologies have allowed engineering departments to take greater advantage of available hardware resources and have opened doors for creating larger, more realistic simulations
