DOE Industrial Combustion Activities: Focusing on Industrial Combustion Needs Into the 21st Century

Combustion activities of DOE's Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT) are progressing well. This presentation will provide an overview of current OIT combustion projects and will note other speakers at this symposium who will provide detail on their OIT-sponsored projects and activities. The adoption of the "Industries of the Future" focus strategy by OIT emphasizes both the forward looking nature of this strategy anC: the driving of all OIT activities, including combustion activities, by industry. The strategy involves the creation by each industry of its own "vision", where it sees itself being at a point in the 21st century. Most industries have chosen the year 2020. Each industry then prepares a "technology roadmap" which identifies the steps needed to move from the current technology level to the state described in the vision. Each roadmap will serve as the basis of the OIT RD&D program for that industry. As the focus industries have developed their visions and embarked on their roadmaps, there has been a tendency on the part of these industries to emphasize production process related needs, overlooking crosscutting technology areas such as combustion. Over the last few years, several workshops, end user industry surveys and studieS have been undertaken to formulate direction for OIT combustion activities. The most recent of these have emphasized the focus industries. Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, working with focus end user industry representatives has identified a number of combustion-related industry needs which will be summarized in the following paper. These needs will be considered by representatives of each industry in assembling industry visions and technology roadmaps which will guide OIT combustion activities in the future.