VRFurnace: An Interactive Virtual Environment for Examining Furnace Performance

摘要

Currently three-dimensional fully immersive virtual reality is used as enabling technology for a wide range of applications, from medical procedures to space exploration. Within the coal utilization industry, implementation of virtual power plants will enable the user to gain a detailed understanding of operational issues, model and explore advanced technologies, and optimize the combustion process at an advanced level of detail. Virtual power plants have the potential to help reduce costs and increase efficiency by enabling the user to simultaneously view the design and operational changes, reducing the risk associated with the implementation of new technologies. These virtual power plants will bring together detailed digital simulations of industrial processes, with operating virtual components, experimental and power plant based data and logs, and intelligent plant analysis tools. In order to promote this capability, the U.S. Department of Energy has identified virtual demonstrations as one of the key supporting technologies needed for the development of Vision 21 plants. Development of virtual power plants will require that many computational intensive technologies be enhanced and closely integrated. These technologies include computer-aided design/engineering (CAD/CAE), computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, systems analysis, information management, and advanced visualization. This paper will discuss the development of a generalized toolkit that can be used to interact with and understand CFD models of the boiler and its different units in a virtual environment. This virtual platform can be used to address a wide range of power plant issues concurrently, including those of construction, operations, maintenance, and engineering. A coal-fired furnace is a complex, three-dimensional, reacting, two-phase flow device. In these furnaces there are a wide range of concerns including heat transfer, formation of unwanted pollutants, and the particle paths of the ash. Additionally, computational models for this environment are large (>1,000,000 cells) and have complex geometries. This toolkit enables the computational model of a coal-fired furnace to be quickly placed into a fully interactive, three-dimensional virtual environment. Within the toolkit, methodologies have been implemented that enable the user to examine these large and complex environments, understand the key concerns, and visualize possible solutions. The effectiveness of this environment will be demonstrated using a tangentially fired, pulverized coal furnace operated by Alliant Energy. This paper discusses the strengths and potential applications of the current furnace toolkit, current development needs, and a road map of technologies required.