Research stay at The Chair of Automatic Control and Systems Theory, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

I am Jian Tiong, currently doing my PhD study at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 

Data speaks louder than words. Energy security is becoming more and more important for the world we are living in due to the booming of data centres and geopolitical issues. Therefore, there would be important to control and utilize the power system. 

My research study is focusing on digital twin gas turbine with specialized on system optimization in term of energy output. The whole idea of digital twin gas turbine is first to establish an artificial model for gas turbine with data available and predict some crucial parameters by using deep learning model, for example gas temperature in the combustion chamber where it greatly affected the final work output of the gas turbine. With the established model, it will optimize the physical gas turbine, for instance, control the mass flow of fuel or the flow of cooling air etc.  The system could also be used for condition monitoring for gas turbine as it could shorten the downtime for gas turbine with advanced fault detection. With this established model, the team is aiming to bring this digital twin model to the future gas turbine, for example hydrogen or ammonia gas turbine. This research aims to fully utilize all the data generated from a gas turbine engine. The established technology from the research of digital twin model could be applied in other fields as the world is moving towards digitalization with the advanced hardware.  

Beside this, I am also involved in the study of hydrogen generation by ammonia via convective heat transfer. The objective of the study is to reduce the cost of electricity generated by hydrogen gas turbine in the near future by utilizing the exhaust heat from the power plants. It is obvious that it is cheaper to store ammonia compared to hydrogen due to the widely available infrastructure for ammonia gas and also hydrogen properties. Precious metal catalyst helped to decompose ammonia in a lower temperature, hence, mild changes are required in the gas turbine power system as to minimize the effect of the gas flow in the existing power plant.