02/14/2022
By Noah Van Dam

The Mechanical Engineering Department welcomes Tianfeng Lu from the University of Connecticut as part of the department's research seminar series on Friday, Feb. 18, 2022 at 1 p.m. 

This seminar will be help virtually. Please contact Prof. Noah Van Dam for a Zoom meeting link.

Seminar Title: Strategies to Accommodate Complex Chemical Kinetics for Alternative Jet Fuels in CFD Applications

Abstract:
Alternative jet fuels made from renewable resources are receiving renewed interests lately from the aerospace sector. Due to the vastly different sources and processes involved in the production of such alternative fuels, the molecular structures and fuel compositions can differ dramatically, resulting in highly complex chemical kinetic mechanisms to predict their combustion behaviors. This presentation will briefly review the strategies employed in the national jet fuel combustion program (NJFCP) for developing accurate and efficient chemical kinetic models for alternative jet fuels, including the HyChem approach by the Stanford team, and development of reduced HyChem models amenable for large scale CFD applications based on such methods as directed relation graph (DRG), quasi steady state approximations, dynamic chemical stiffness removal, analytic computing techniques and dynamic adaptive hybrid integration (AHI). A chemical explosive mode analysis (CEMA) will be further presented for systematic identification of critical flame features, such as local ignition and extinction, onset of flame instabilities, and the complex chemistry-turbulence interactions in strongly turbulent flames relevant to jet engine applications.

Speaker Biography:
Professor Tianfeng Lu is an Associate Professor at University of Connecticut. Lu received his B.S. (1994) and M.S. (1997) in Engineering Mechanics from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. (2004) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, where he has been a research associate from 2004 and a research staff from 2005 before joining UConn in 2008. He is a Fellow of the Combustion Institute and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. His primary research interests include computational fluid dynamics with detailed chemistry as well as reduction of large chemical kinetic mechanisms for computationally efficient simulation of complex multidimensional, turbulent reacting flows and other engineering systems.