Benjamin Böhm - TU Darmstadt - Germany
Solid fuel combustion: challenges and opportunities using laser diagnostics
Bénédicte Cuenot - SAFRAN - France
Dr-HdR B. Cuenot obtained her engineering diploma and Master's degree from Ecole Centrale de Paris in 1990. After a year as a research engineer at the University of Boulder (CO, USA), she defended her PhD in 1995 and her HdR in 2000, both in the field of numerical combustion. For some thirty years, she worked on numerical simulation (DNS and LES) of turbulent multiphase reactive flows, heat transfer (including thermal radiation) and plasma flows in industrial systems. Ms. Cuenot has taught combustion and fluid mechanics at various universities and is the author of around 150 articles published in peer-reviewed journals. She led the combustion research group at CERFACS from the 2000s until recently, and has been Full Professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven from 2021 to 2024. She was appointed Fellow of the Combustion Institute in 2018 and has been a member of the Combustion and Flame editorial board. She was co-chair of the 39th International Combustion Symposium, held in Vancouver in July 2022. Ms Cuenot joined Safran Aircraft Engines in April 2024, where she is a combustion expert.
Simulation methods for low environmental impact aero-engine design
Benedetta Franzelli - Ecole Centrale Paris - France
Benedetta Franzelli is a Researcher of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the EM2C Laboratory (UPR288) at CentraleSupélec, Université ParisSaclay. Dr. Franzelli research interests are in theoretical, experimental, and numerical characterization of multi-phase turbulent reactive flows. At EM2C, she leads the investigation of organic and inorganic nanoparticles production in turbulent flames using in-situ optical diagnostics and high-fidelity CFD. She graduated at Politecnico di Milano (2007) and received her PhD from Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse (CERFACS, 2011). As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she worked at the EM2C Laboratory (2012, 2013) and at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University (2014). She has been the recipient of a Stanford Center for Turbulence Research PostDoctoral Fellowship (2012), the Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Institute (2014), the Bronze Medal from CNRS (2018) and a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2018).
Nanoparticle Flame Synthesis: when combustion is a catalyst for sustainability
Metal-oxide (MO) nanoparticles are one of the keys to attaining the sustainable development goals of the United Nations by creating new high-performance materials with breakthrough potential, such as photo-catalysis or energy storage. Among the existing aerosol processes, attention is increasingly given to turbulent spray flame synthesis via flame spray pyrolysis systems (FSP) as a fast, one-step, large-scale, inexpensive technology to produce MO based on more than 40 elements in the periodic table with constant material quality. In addition, FSP provides a unique environment for the generation of MO that will experience steep temperature gradients over a limited residence time (ms), leading to unprecedented characteristics of MO for a one-step process with improved material performances, such as meta-stable or core/shell nanoparticles. The optimization of these systems classically relies on an empirical tuning of the operating conditions towards the desired characteristics of the final power. However, the development of rigorous systematic optimization strategies should be pursued, albeit they are achievable only once the aerosol process in flames is fully controlled. For this, a deep understanding and an accurate modeling of the aerosol process in flames is essential. In this presentation, we will show how knowledge on turbulent combustion and soot production can be used to investigate the synthesis of nanoparticles in flames. Recent developments of laser diagnostics and high-performance simulations specific to metal-oxide flame synthesis will be discussed. Then, the developed approaches will be used to study the particle characteristics and their link with the local ambient conditions all along the flame. Finally, the major scientific challenges and future perspectives for combustion in advancing ‘green’ aerosol technology will be discussed.
Luca Magri - Imperial - UK
AI in fluids and combustion
Eric Mueller - NIST - USA
Dr. Eric Mueller is a research scientist in the Wildland-Urban Interface group of the Fire Research Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States. Dr. Mueller joined NIST in 2021 following both postdoctoral and PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he received a Best Thesis award from the International Association of Fire Safety Science. His research focus is on the quantification of transport processes in wildland fire combustion environments, at both laboratory and field scale, primarily in support of numerical modeling. He is a member of the development team of NIST’s Fire Dynamics Simulator.
Challenges in modeling wildland fire dynamics: capturing the multi-scale effects of fuel structure
Wildland and wildland-urban interface fires are a growing global problem in the 21st century. This is evidenced by numerous destructive fires in recent years, both in Europe and beyond. The challenges associated with mitigating these impacts are directly related to the challenges in understanding the processes driving wildland fire across the range of scales at which they occur. The ability to understand and therefore model these processes will lead to improved numerical models for planning and response to fires. A unique complexity of wildland fires, in contrast to other topics in fire science and combustion, is the importance of vegetative fuel and its thermophysical and structural properties. Models of wildland fire dynamics, across the full range of complexity, must parameterize these properties and their variability in one way or another in order to capture their importance.
This presentation will explore ongoing efforts at NIST, and elsewhere, to quantify the role of fuel properties on the burning dynamics of vegetation. A particular focus is placed on momentum, heat, and mass transfer between solid and gas phase and attempts to decouple these phenomena in simple configurations. These studies are linked to quantification of global combustion dynamics, such as heat release rate and radiative emission, with full-scale experiments of burning vegetation. It will also be demonstrated how tools for quantifying vegetation structure at field scale are rapidly improving, as are computational capabilities for large-scale detailed fire spread calculations. An outstanding challenge is therefore the ability to leverage these capabilities by developing appropriate submodels which can give consistent results across scales of both model resolution and complexity.
