Abstract :

In direct injection gasoline engines, stratified mode of combustion increases the fuel efficiency and lowers CO2 emissions. We need a complete understanding of the fundamentals of stratified flame propagation in order to take advantage of the benefits of stratified combustion. An experimental investigation of laminar flame propagation through stratified mixture fields was carried out in order to determine the memory effect of stratification on the enhancement of flame propagation. To realize that, an original PIV algorithm was developed to directly measure the local laminar burning velocity that I will present in the talk. The second part of the talk is an experimental study on thermoacoustic instabilities, which remains one of the biggest problems facing manufacturers of gas turbines. In these devices, the acoustics is usually linear, but the flame’s heat-release response to incident perturbations is highly nonlinear. The overall thermoacoustic system is therefore expected to behave as a coupled nonlinear dynamical system. A dynamical systems approach has been used to study the nonlinear interaction between self-excited oscillations and forced oscillations in a combustor containing a swirl-stabilized turbulent premixed flame. Coal thermal power plants provide almost 28% of world's primary energy consumption and emit around 36% of all CO2 pollutants. Oxyfuel coal combustion technology is a possible way to address the pollution problem. My third part of the talk is the implementation of optical diagnostics to a laboratory-scale oxyfuel pulverized coal combustor. The aim of the project is to study the flame structures under various O2/CO2 conditions and to generate database for the support of numerical simulations. I will present some of our findings and the challenges involved in applying the optical diagnostic techniques to the coal combustion. BIO : Dr. Saravanan Balusamy is currently working as a research associate at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his Ph.D. from INSA of Rouen, France in October 2010 and his M.Tech from IIT Madras, India in 2006. He is a University 10th rank holder in his Bachelor of Engineering from Bharathiar University, India.In his PhD, he showed how conventional PIV processing is not capable to process data from laminar spherical flames, which require different PIV interrogation window scheme. At Cambridge, he has worked initially on implementing PIV and OH-PLIF in oxygen-coal fired systems, and later, on measurements of flow instabilities in a high-pressure industrial system and analysis of the dynamics of combustion instabilities. He is actively engaged in guiding and mentoring PhD and Masters students projects. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 articles, conference papers and research reports. He has been a member of combustion institute since 2011. He is a participant of the Emerging Research Leadership Development Programme conducted by the University of Cambridge. His research interests are fluid mechanics, combustion, laser diagnostics techniques and thermoacoustic instabilities. ALL ARE WELCOME