More details about the research being developed in Prof. Thanh Nguyen’s research group can be found in UConn Today.
Research
Prof. Xinyu Zhao Awarded American Chemical Society Grant for Research on Bluff-Body Stabilized Premixed Flame
Dr. Xinyu Zhao has been awarded an American Chemical Society Grant through the Petroleum Research fund for her research entitled “A computational study of the lean blow-off mechanisms for a bluff-body stabilized premixed flame.” The fund supports research directly related to petroleum and fossil fuels at nonprofit institutions around the world.
Increasingly stringent emission requirements have recently generated a great deal of interest in lean and stable combustors, i.e. combustors that manipulate air-fuel ratios to increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions while maintaining stable combustion. One way to stabilize flames in a combustor is through bluff bodies, but the events that lead to lean blowoff (flame extinction) remain unclear due to a variety of factors that require consideration (e.g. highly-transient turbulent flow fields and finite-rate chemistry).
Professor Zhao’s research aims to further the understanding of this phenomenon by using a large-eddy simulation to model and investigate a bluff-body stabilized lean premixed propane flame undergoing intense turbulence. UConn ME colleagues in Professor Baki Cetegen’s group carry out the experiments using laser diagnostics. The proposed modeling study allows flame characteristics such as turbulent flame speed, flame surface densities, strain rates, and various chemical and flow time scales relevant to blowoff to be studied and compared with real world experiments. Discovering the key time scales that lead to blowoff could yield controlling strategies and operation conditions for bluff-body stabilized flames.
Recently Professor Zhao also received the Young Investigator (YIP) Award from the Air Force Office of Science and Research. Read more about her research on her website.
Prof. Zhao Awarded Air Force Young Investigator Program for Work on Turbulent Premixed Flames
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) has honored Professor Xinyu Zhao as one of just 43 scientists and engineers awarded YIP grants for her research project titled “Pockets in Highly Turbulent Premixed Flames: Physics and Implications on Modeling.” The grant is worth a total of $450,000 over three years and is intended to foster the research of young investigators in science and engineering.
Dr. Zhao’s research aims to understand the underlying physical processes of highly turbulent premixed flames, which impact the efficiency and stability of modern aeronautical engines.
The investigation targets two specific “pockets”: the fresh-mixture pockets on the product side of the flame (“FiP”) and the product pockets on the fresh mixture side of the flame (“PiF”). The existence of these pockets is a distinctive feature of flames within the broken reaction zones, and is hypothesized to contribute to the deviation of the flame statistics from those within the flamelet regimes.
Aiding the current understanding of combustion in aeronautical engines could have far reaching impacts on a number of fields and industries and would be of great benefit to the Air Force. A better understanding of the factors that affect combustion can eventually allow engineers to improve the efficiency of these engines. You can read more about Professor Zhao’s research on her laboratory’s website.
New Device for Testing Heart Health
Dr. George Lykotrafitis and his student Kostyantyn Partola have been featured for their development of a device that tests blood viscosity – an important indicator of heart health. Kostyantyn has had support from the Accelerate UConn program as well as the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Fellowship program to support the commercialization of the technology. More information on their work can be found at UConn Today: http://today.uconn.edu/2017/09/new-device-testing-heart-health/