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Combustion Science
Combustion, commonly known as burning, is a high-temperature chemical reaction in which a fuel undergoes an exothermic redox process with an oxidizer—most often oxygen from the air—resulting in oxidized products, typically gases, that together form what is called smoke.
The study of combustion tells us how fuels chemically react with oxidizers to release heat, light, and products such as CO₂ and H₂O. At its core, it combines chemistry, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics-making it a classic multi-physics subject.
Why combustion matters?
Combustion is still the dominant way humanity converts chemical energy into userful power for cars, airplanes, power plants, and rockets. Understanding it allows engineers to design engines and turbines that are more efficient and reliable.
Poorly controlled combustion produces pollutants such as NOx, CO, and soot. Studying combustion helps engineers develop cleaner systems and alternative fuels to reduce emissions.
Knowledge of combustion is critical in preventing and managing explosions, fires, and detonations in industrial and aerospace applications.
From hypersonic flight to reneawable biofuels and hydrogen, combustion research drives progress in next-generation transportation and sustainable energy systems.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
CFD is the use of numerical methods and computer simulations to analyze and predict the behavior of fluids (liquids and gases) and how they interact with boundaries, heat transfer, and chemical reactions. Instead of relying only on experiments, CFD solves the governing equations of fluid motion (the Navier-Stokes equations) together with models for turbulence, heat transfer, and combustion chemistry to provide detailed insights into complex flow fields.
Why CFD matters in combustion research?
Combustion involves strong coupling between fluid motion, chemical reactions, heat release, and sometimes phase changes (like liquid fuel sprays). Experiments alone can't easily resolve all these details, but CFD allows researchers to probe them virtually.
Engineers can use CFD to design more efficient engines, turbines, or burners by testing many design variations in silico before building prototypes, saving both time and cost.
CFD helps understand where pollutants such as NOx, CO, and soot from inside combustion devices, guiding strategies to minimize them.
Some combustion scenarios—like rocket engines, gas turbines, or detonation waves—are difficult or dangerous to test experimentally. CFD provides a safe and detailed way to study them.
As the energy field shifts toward alternative fuels (hydrogen, biofuels, ammonia), CFD helps predict how these fuels burn and interact with existing technologies, accelerating the transition to cleaner systems.
Research Focus
Combustion is not a dirty word; it remains a versatile source of power. With new combustion concepts incorporating alternative fuels and novel ignition strategies, the multi-scale nature of the physics becomes prominent. The significance of turbulent flow and supersonic regime expands the range of energy-containing scales down to the molecular level. The multi-physics nature becomes more pronounced with the incorporation of thermal-fluid-structure interaction (TFSI) into the analysis, an area that few studies have explored. These combined complexity makes it increasingly challenging to numerically simulate the underlying physics.
My research aims to develop comprehensive computational mechanics solutions capable of simulating these complex physics while maintaining low computational cost. To accomplish this, I employ scale-breakdown studies, involving chemical kinetics analysis, component-level simulations, and large-scale device-level simulations. While commercially available software is useful for device-level simulations, I make extensive use of an open-source software platform as a testbed for component-level sub-physics modeling. These efforts are made possible through strategic collaborations with experimental teams.
My ongoing and future research direction includes the development of a high-speed reacting solver for detonation and hypersonic combustor, as well as a two-way coupling TFSI solver—a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary study that integrates input from material scientists. These developments will add significant value in advancing novel combustion concepts for both land-based and aerospace propulsion research.
The main research topics can be categorized into four areas, as indicated in the Figure above. The focus at the system level ranges from component-scale modeling on an open-source CFD platform to large-scale device-level simulations using commercial CFD software. Further classification is made based on two combustion modes: deflagration (subsonic combustion) and detonation (supersonic combustion). The comprehensive impact of multi-physics is examined within the framework of thermal-fluid-structure interaction (TFSI), a term I coined to differentiate it from the traditional fluid-structure interaction (FSI) concept. This incorporates dynamical change in mechanical and chemical properties on the structure upon contact with the thermal fluid.
Recent advancements in available CFD tools have made high-fidelity solutions achievable to some extent. However, there remains a trade-off between computational cost and predictive accuracy when complex physics are involved. To alleviate this challenge, my research aims to develop advanced computing algorithms on an open-source CFD platform, with the goal of eventually transitioning them to the commercial software market.
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