SIEMENS

On a dark screen, a hand-rolled wire coil comes into view from the right and begins to glow. A flame shoots up from a small opening on the lower edge of the screen. The flame seems peculiarly unstable, with its bluish light flickering back and forth like an apparition. An unseen experimenter then literally hits the gas, and the flame stands upright. The show ends a few seconds later when Dr. Andrey Bartenev clicks on another window displaying a snapshot of the same flame, but this time as a colorful simulated image. The simulation is remarkably similar to the real flame in the video.

Bartenev, who heads the Energy Technology and Energy Resources department at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Moscow, is delighted. Hardly any other organization on earth can simulate combustion processes in gas turbines as precisely as his ten-member team.

When the lab was established in 2005, Bartenev, a secretary, and the Head of CT in Russia, Martin Gitsels, worked alone in an old building behind the Paveletsky train station. Today, the lab has over 50 employees specializing in various disciplines, 23 of whom work at CT in St. Petersburg. The workforce has grown in line with the lab’s success. In the beginning the lab received orders modeling combustion processes in gas turbines. Only a few of these assignments were commissioned from Germany, where Siemens has much bigger teams that calculate combustion processes and optimal turbine blade shapes. But that quickly changed after information about the skills of Bartenev and his team spread at Siemens’ Energy sector in Erlangen, Germany.

Bartenev, 44, is a physicist who earned quite a reputation between 1987 and 2005 at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow with his work on the "Chemistry of Fast Processes" in combustion and explosions. He also performed research at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and NASA in the U.S. The contacts he established in Moscow benefit the Siemens team today. Bartenev’s group now has its hands full, and it is only Russian modesty that keeps them from admitting that many gas-turbine burner simulations used at Siemens originate in Moscow.

The team’s main task is to test new burner designs developed by their colleagues in Germany. This involves virtually igniting a burner on a computer and monitoring its flame behavior with regard to various parameters, including gas composition, flow rate, and mixing processes. The results are passed on to developers in Germany, who incorporate them into combustion chamber and turbine designs. The components themselves are not simulated in Moscow. "We just focus on the individual flames," says Bartenev.

Complex Flame Simulation. When asked if there’s such a thing as an optimal burner or gas mixture, Bartenev shakes his head, explaining that there are dozens of burner designs for turbines whose outputs range from a hundred kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts. What’s more, operation involves either natural gas or syngas — a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That’s why the simulations are so valuable. They dramatically reduce development times and costs by eliminating the need to test each new design in the lab.

Still, developing modeling algorithms for such simulations requires a lot of know-how. Two components are used to develop these algorithms: a software module that calculates reaction kinetics — the chemical reaction process — and a second module for gas dynamics, which calculates the dissemination of the gas particles in the combustion chamber at intervals of a few milliseconds. The latter is a commercial software product. Some standard software also exists for the first module’s task, but the processes are complex and need too much computing power. Simplifying the methods reduces accuracy, as calculations of chemical reactions are extremely complex.