virtual
engineering
In
powerful new workspaces, the next-generation power plant is only the beginning.
the
U.S. Department of Energy has big plans for the future of coal-based power
production. Advanced power plants will have higher efficiencies and dramatically
lower emissions, so low that some people are referring to them as "near-zero
emission" plants.
Not only will the plant of the future be different from today's, but the
design tools that engineers use will be different, too. To reduce cost
and shorten development time for the future plants, the DOE is developing
virtual engineering as an enabling technology. It will let engineers of
the near future test more ideas more quickly than they ever could by traditional
methods, and no one can predict what possibilities that may unlock—not
just for power generation but across entire fields of technology.
Traditionally, new designs for power facilities had to be physically built
and tested at various scales. This is a costly and time-consuming process.
It puts practical limits on the number and novelty of ideas that a designer
can try.
The goal of the virtual engineering system is to let designers of next-generation
power facilities test and develop cutting-edge technologies, such as new
clean power, carbon capture, and coal-to-hydrogen technologies, before
they create a pilot plant. Using virtual engineering, the DOE plans to
reduce the design cycle time and to allow new technologies to reach production
and operation more quickly than would have been possible in previous decades.
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| New design tools enable engineers to explore fluid dynamics from inside a virtual flow field, represented here as a matrix of glowing triangles. |
The system is being developed by researchers at the Ames National Laboratory,
Iowa State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and industry partners
including Reaction Engineering International of Salt Lake City and Fluent
Inc. of Lebanon, N.H.
Many of the enabling technologies being developed are based on virtual
engineering concepts.
Researchers at Iowa State's Virtual Reality Applications Center, where
the development work is based, are coupling computational models with
visualization and interaction tools to permit real-time exploration of
proposed designs. These tools enable the engineer to explore, troubleshoot,
and design systems and components within a virtual design space just as
if the component were real.
New components will be placed in the power plant and overall performance
of the plant checked without having to build physical models. Components
will be modified in real time without having to go back to the analysis
and modeling process.
The designer will have a visual interface that is as familiar and engineer-friendly
as a real plant, with a few advantages added. The power plant and components
will be shown at any scale needed. The engineer will be able to walk through
the virtual power plant and see it run, step into a set of cleanup filters
and determine why they are plugging, or simply ride a particle of coal
as it travels through the plant.
These tools will reduce engineering turnaround time and improve engineering
designs and products. Central to obtaining these benefits is the inclusion
of detailed numerical simulations of processes and components that can
be accessed on the fly.
As envisioned, the software will let an engineering team alter the shape,
size, operating conditions, or other characteristics of equipment in a
power plant and see the effect of these changes throughout the plant.
For example, an engineer wanting to change the performance characteristics
of a coal gasifier may wish to adjust nozzle parameters (e.g., diameter,
angle, length) that affect how the oxygen and coal slurry are injected
into the gasifier. The virtual engineering system will determine what
effects the changes have on the composition of the syngas being produced
by the plant as well as the change in overall efficiency and cost.
Getting Up to Speed
In nearly all aspects of power plant simulation—for design, construction,
or maintenance—the simulations have traditionally involved an iterative
process of off-line setup, calculation, and analysis. The time required
for each iteration can range from one day to several weeks. Based on engineering
judgment and the results of the previous simulation, this process is then
repeated for a slightly altered system until a satisfactory result is
achieved. The results of the computational modeling are then typically
shared with other engineers, design team members, and management. Even
if three-dimensional analysis tools are used, the design team's
participation in the design process is still discontinuous in that they
can only actively participate in the design after each round of calculations
has been completed, reviewed, and edited.
Because of the time-consuming nature of this process, detailed fluids
and heat transfer calculations have generally been used near the end of
the design process to gain insight, rather than at the beginning to explore
new designs. Because significant changes deep into the design process
are costly, the impact of detailed computational modeling on the final
design is limited.
Thus, the traditional process does not support real-time, collaborative
design in which the engineer establishes the dynamic thinking process
needed to obtain an intuitive feel for the performance and nature of the
power plant. It also does not permit the real-time exploration of questions
raised by other engineers, designers, or managers. This working arrangement
significantly limits the number of alternatives that can be investigated,
limits the essential creative design process, and discourages the "what
if" questions that allow breakthroughs in design.
Virtual engineering seeks to overcome these problems by creating a virtual
workspace and closely integrating many computationally intensive technologies,
such as computer-aided design and engineering, computational fluid dynamics,
finite element analysis, high-performance computing, intelligent process
control, system analysis, information management, and advanced visualization.
This engineering workspace will include all aspects of plant performance,
analysis results, economics models, and any other quantitative or qualitative
information needed in the engineering design process.
This range of information and capability will enable all stakeholders
to fully participate and understand the details of the analysis so that
they can consider all points of view, obtain the maximum benefit of analysis,
and find engineering solutions that may have been overlooked.
Virtual engineering techniques require gathering information from diverse
sources throughout the power plant birth-to-death tracking process, and
then adding engineering judgment and experience to transform the raw information
into useful knowledge and understanding. Effectively presented information
allows humans to analyze complex patterns, synthesize opportunities, and
evaluate alternative processes.
Bringing together simulation programs, measured plant data, and high-fidelity
visualization produces an experience similar to a physical inspection
of an actual device. In such an environment, people from various disciplines
with diverse but complementary experience can collaborate. This collaboration
provides rich opportunities to discover the optimum, explore the unexpected,
and solve problems.
Matching the Parts
To integrate all these parts in an intuitive manner will require a software
framework, which is being developed by the Virtual Engineering Research
Group at Iowa State University. The software is a virtual engineering
toolkit called VE-Suite. It is composed of three main software engines—VE-CE,
VE-Xplorer, and VE-Conductor—that coordinate the flow of data from
the engineer to the virtual components being designed.
VE-CE is responsible for the synchronization of the data among the various
analysis and process models and the engineer. VE-Xplorer is the decision-making
environment that allows the engineer to interact with the equipment models
in a visual manner. VE-Conductor is the engineer's mechanism to control
models and other information.
An open-source communication standard, VE-Open, allows the VE-Suite software
engines and components to be integrated seamlessly and consequently gives
the engineer and other stakeholders access to the information in their
virtual power plant. VE-Open is a new standard being developed at Iowa
State and the Ames National Laboratory. It provides features that include
distributed computing, platform independence, extensibility for component
models, support for a hierarchy of component models, and comprehensive
graphics capabilities including support for immersive facilities.
The overall goal of VE-Suite is to enable users to incorporate component
models and corresponding two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphical
representations to create new, plug-and-play components. By design, these
components can be distributed across computational resources to make the
most efficient use of resources.
VE-Suite is part of a group of software packages being developed to support
the design of advanced power plants. Computational scientists and engineers
at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W.Va., are
working with industrial partners to develop the Advanced Process Engineering
Co-Simulator. Known as APECS, it is an integration framework that combines
process simulation software with equipment models.
"Accurate process simulations are critical for enabling systems analysts
to develop superior plant designs and to optimize existing plants," said
Stephen Zitney, research group leader for process and dynamic systems
modeling at NETL. "This powerful co-simulation technology is the first
to provide the necessary level of detail and accuracy essential for engineers
to better understand and optimize the fluid flow, heat and mass transfer,
and chemical reactions that drive overall plant performance."
Coupled with VE-Suite and high-performance computing, APECS offers opportunities
for exploiting virtual plant simulation to reduce the time, cost, and
technical risk of developing high-efficiency, zero-emission power plants.
VE-Suite and APECS each handle different aspects of the complex issues
associated with building and developing a near zero-emission plant. APECS
will be used to model the syngas flowing throughout the plant while VE-Suite
will handle the integration of the disparate models associated with the
birth-to-death tracking of these new power plants. APECS and VE-Suite
will be integrated to build a virtual power plant that covers all aspects
of power plant design, operation, and maintenance.
Virtual engineering may sound like a laboratory tool that will take a
long time to reach the practical applications in industry. However, companies
are starting to implement virtual engineering tools in their engineering
production and design process.
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| Visual engineering tools such as VE-Suite can provide designers with real-time, 3-D graphic representations of power plants. |
For example, Fuel Tech Inc., a manufacturer of NOx control systems in
Stamford, Conn., uses a virtual engineering software package called Acuitiv.
Developed in-house by Fuel Tech, Acuitiv couples a computational model
of an industrial furnace with a virtual environment. A user can make changes
to the inlet nozzle configuration and explore various furnace configurations,
then see the resulting furnace performance on the fly. This enables the
engineer to consider a number of variables to create the optimum design
for a particular furnace.
John Zink Co., a Tulsa-based developer of combustion systems, has implemented
virtual engineering techniques by coupling experimental data with high-fidelity
CFD models. The company is using VE-Suite to allow its customers to better
understand the physics and engineering principles incorporated in advanced
burner technologies and to evaluate their performance in a variety of
industrial applications. John Zink has implemented virtual engineering
techniques by integrating its industry-leading experimental research facilities
with high-fidelity CFD simulation capabilities.
Christopher Jian, director of John Zink's Simulation Technology Solutions
Group, said, "Advances in computational fluid dynamics and the availability
of a new generation of high-speed computers have enabled us to simulate
the most complex and challenging physico-chemical processes in industrial
furnaces and boilers. Historically we relied on CFD experts to interpret
simulation results. With the implementation of VE-Suite, we are able to
offer our customers and our engineers the opportunity to evaluate the
simulation results from a first-person perspective."
Upon implementation of VE-Suite into the engineering process, engineers
at John Zink saw an improved understanding among customers and quicker
delivery of burners. Review time decreased from approximately two weeks
to one or two days, according to Jian. The combination of CFD models and
burner facilities lets customers see the burner operating in a real furnace
as well as in a virtual furnace.
Omaha Public Power District in Nebraska has used VE-Suite to analyze the
potential fire damage to an auxiliaries building at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear
Power Station. A set of Excel spreadsheets (NUREG-1805), developed by
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for on-site fire scenario hazard analysis,
and a digital scan of an auxiliaries room are used together as inputs
to VE-Suite. The resulting virtual engineering tool can then be used to
determine the damage to various components depending on the fire type
and location, and saves the engineer time-consuming and tedious back-and-forth
checking between the spreadsheets and the physical space.
Alliant Energy, the power holding company based in Madison, Wis., is working
with Iowa State University to implement a virtual engineering application
to optimize the coal transport system in a power plant. In a coal-fired
plant, pulverized coal is pneumatically transported toward different burner
nozzles by splitting a large pipe into small pipes through bifurcators
or trifurcators. During the flow through the piping, gravity, inertia,
and other forces may cause the coal particles to separate from the air.
The paths of the pipes are complex, with many bends, so uneven coal distribution
is common. When fuel inputs to the burner are not balanced, combustion
efficiency greatly decreases, and emissions increase. This problem must
be handled when designing the pipe system. The virtual engineering application
that is implemented to solve this problem allows the engineer to interact
with the coal transport pipes to adjust various physical aspects of the
pipe, such as orifice plate diameters and locations. The engineer using
this tool can focus on designing the pipe and not on the complex modeling
and visualization codes.
Reducing the time and cost of developing innovative, more efficient coal-fired
power plants with significantly lower emissions is what's driving the
virtual power plants program. But virtual engineering is beginning to
be used in many industries. From manufacturing facilities to the design
of agricultural equipment, the ability to bring together data, models,
geometry, and other product information and interact with the result in
a natural interface is starting to change the way we do engineering.
In the future, virtual engineering will touch almost every product design
process. Imagine five to 10 years from now, when an engineer develops
a custom heart valve for a patient based on real-time three-dimensional
images of the heart, and can see and optimize the performance of the heart
valve for that patient.
The first steps toward that kind of capability are being built today for
power plant design.
|
Build Your Virtual Engineering Applications VE-Suite is the open-source
software toolkit that is being developed at the Virtual Reality
Applications Center at Iowa State University. VE-Suite is used in
many of the projects discussed in this article as well as a number
of other engineering projects. While much of the development has
focused on power applications, VE-Suite is currently used for projects
ranging from machine design to techno-economic modeling. |
Mark Bryden is professor and associate chair of
mechanical engineering at Iowa State University in Ames and is the head
of the virtual engineering research group within the university's Virtual
Reality Applications Center. Doug McCorkle is a Ph.D. student in mechanical
engineering at Iowa State.
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© 2005 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers