Abstract :

V’yacheslav Akkerman graduated with distinction from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia, with B.Sc. (2001) and M.Sc. (2003) degrees in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and received his Ph.D. from Umeå University, Sweden, in 2007. He also holds a Philosophy Licentiate degree from Umeå University and a Candidate of Science (Ph.D. equivalent) degree from the Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Akkerman was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University in 2007–2008 and a research staff member in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University in 2008–2012. He accepted his current position at West Virginia University in August, 2012. Abstract Often a useful tool, but occasionally the cause of disasters, fire has accompanied mankind for millennia. Protecting our ancestors from the coldness, darkness, predators and stomach bacteria, combustion has brought primitive, tribal humans into the modern industrial society. In spite of the modern striking achievements in alternative/renewable energy such as solar, wind, and geothermal, as well as nuclear fission/fusion, combustibles will likely remain the dominant source of energy for industry, heating and transportation in the foreseeable future, which strongly motivates continued interest in combustion research. For the last decade, the lecturer has worked on several interconnected problems in combustion science: intrinsic flame instabilities; turbulent burning; flame interaction with acoustics, shocks, combustor walls and interior obstacles; and flame acceleration with particular interest in deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT). The last item lies behind countless disasters in rockets, power plants and mines, although it can also be constructively utilized in such combustion devices as pulse-detonation engines. The lecturer and his colleagues have determined the turbulent flame speeds and analyzed self-similar acceleration of expanding flames in free space; revealed several distinctive stages within the DDT scenario in micro-tubes/channels; developed theories that describe the propagation dynamics and morphology of the flamefront; and substantiated the theories through numerical simulations. The talk will focus on elucidating the similarities and differences between the flame dynamics in various configurations, and will also briefly overview the extension of combustion science to astrophysics, plasma physics, as well as the pseudo-hydrodynamic phenomena in advanced materials such as organic semiconductors and crystals of molecular/nano-magnets.