My research interests cover combustion, heat transfer, and aerosols.  I am particularly interested in applied thermal engineering and have ongoing research in jet flames, fire dynamics, furnace and oven design, and IC Engines.  Here is some of our recent work in applied CFD.

Research Projects:

Fire Dynamics

We have conducted large scale (house scale) tests of Positive Pressure Ventilation (PPV) in collaboration with the Austin Fire Department.  We continue to investigate the dynamics of human (firefighter) to fire coupling.  The fire and firefighter influence each other, and we are trying to better understand the science of this coupling.  We are creating a fire education web site.  Here is a recent presentation of how an Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) might use Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS).

Jet Flames

Jet Flames: In this study we computationally simulate the fluid mechanics and combustion dynamics associated with laminar and turbulent jet flames. We are attempting to create simple engineering design tools and guidelines from detailed experiments and calculations. We have developed an acoustically coupled burner system where we can control the luminosity (amount of soot) and length of the flame.

Aerosols

We have investigated several different aspects of aerosol evolution.  This spans characterizing the production of combustion generated aerosols (e.g., soot) to evaluation of various aerosol remediation strategies.  Examples of our work in the aerosols area are available. We have an opening for a research assistantship (to begin in summer or fall 2005) for an aerosol sampling and characterization project. Details are available here.

Design of equipment for high-temperature thermal processes is very complex when multiple modes of heat transfer (radiation, convection and/or conduction) are present. Very sophisticated programs have been developed to design such systems. These programs are expensive to run and require large capacity of memory and storage. They are based on "forward" design; that is, the geometry and boundary conditions are specified, and the resulting temperatures and rates of heat transfer are computed. If these are unsatisfactory, then the geometry or other conditions are altered, and the program is rerun. This process is repeated until the desired outcome is reached and the design is then fixed.

An "inverse" design method specifies the desired outcome, and directly finds the conditions necessary to achieve this outcome without iteration. Unfortunately, the mathematics of inverse techniques is poorly developed, because the equations describing inverse design are ill-behaved (near-singular). Based on successful methods we have previously developed and applied to inverse design of radiating systems, we propose to extend inverse design techniques to the much more complex case of multimode heat transfer including combustion sources, where the mathematics becomes not only inverse, but non-linear. The results, if successful, will lead to much more efficient practical design of high-temperature equipment such as turbine engines and industrial/utility furnaces and boilers.

NIST (Dept. of Commerce), NASA (micro-gravity), NSF (CAREER), GCHSRC, 3M Corp, Ford Motor Company, ARL-UT , Department of Energy, Texas Utilities Electric Corp., Texas Higher education Coordinating Board