Member Status:

Full (founding) member

Short Description:

The KIT has been founded as a merger of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH and the University of Karlsruhe in October 2009. About 8000 scientists are working among others on fundamental topics, material science nanotechnologies, microsystems, environmental topics, and medicine technologies. About 50% of the work may be attributed to energy research what makes KIT one of the largest energy research center in Europe. The hydrogen related topics are represented by the HyTecGroup comprising the work of about 80 scientists from 6 institutes.

The hydrogen group at the Institute for Nuclear and Energy Technologies IKET at KIT has more than 250 man years research experience in the field of industrial safety. The origin of the group relates to nuclear fission safety analyses, where hydrogen always played a key role in severe accidents but also in the normal operatioms of the boiling water reactors. Since 1992 this team contributed to seven EU projects concerning hydrogen explosion hazards.

About 25 researchers are specialized on safety issues related to hydrogen and dust explosion hazards in nuclear fission and fusion devices and translated the experience to the application of hydrogen as an energy carrier. Since 2002 the team has been performing theoretical and experimental studies of combined hydrogen/dust explosion hazards in ITER and has gained rich experience in this field. Its staff is experienced in handling with ITER-relevant dusts.

KIT has a wide variety of modern analytical devices, own software and experimental facilities to investigate the behavior of hydrogen under all relevant conditions.

Specific Products / Services:

Software

KIT licenses GASFLOW, a solver 3d compressible multi-component, multi-phase fluid mechanics. GASFLOW provides special models for mitigation technologies like recombiners, igniters, and water sprays. It includes models for radiation, heat transfer to structures and particles (dust,…).   The license includes the full source code access. The code is broadly validated and performs well in on Linux based platforms.

COM3D is a 3d combustion solver mainly for pre-mixed systems. Due to broad validation it allows for reliable predictions of safety relevant scenarios including deglagrations to detonations.

Hardware and Consulting

KIT offers additional experimental services and unique combinations of experimental work and simulation based extrapolations. Most of the non-nuclear work is sub-contracted to the KIT spin-off simaps.

Contact:

Dr.-Ing. Thomas Jordan
Insitute for Nuclear and Energy Technologies
KIT Campus Nord
PO Box 3640
76021 Karlsruhe
Germany
Tel. +49 7247 82 6105
Fax Tel. +49 7247 82 4777