Deadline: Applications will be accepted at any time until the position is filled.

To have a realistic chance of reducing the carbon footprint before 2020, intensive actions are required before the date by which a new international climate agreement is due to come into force. Combustion is at the heart of this challenge: fossil fuel combustion accounts for around two-thirds of greenhouse-gas emissions, as more than 80% of global energy consumption is based on fossil fuels. Worldwide, fossil fuels add more than twenty five billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year, along with vast quantities of other pollutants. This places enormous pressure to improve the combustion efficiency with low emissions in transportation and power generation devices while simultaneously developing more diverse fuel streams, including low carbon fuels.

In moving towards cleaner combustion technologies, hydrogen-rich alternative fuel blends, especially those containing significant quantities of hydrogen are undoubtedly significant, because they are environmentally friendly and can be used as an alternative feedstock for energy resources in the clean energy generation.

The research project aims to develop new computational experiments to fundamentally understand the burning issues of hydrogen-rich alternative fuel blends at high pressure conditions. This project will demonstrate how the new predictive engineering models can be used to utilise hydrogen-rich fuels, highlighting the effects of high pressure on clean fuel burning, overall performance, emission distributions and finally provide an optimised industrial guidelines to design combustor performance for hydrogen-rich clean fuel burning at high pressure.

The project will first perform three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) with detailed chemistry at high pressure conditions. The project will then perform three-dimensional Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Mathematical models will be developed to investigate important combustion characteristics such as incorporating strain effects on flame surface wrinkling at varying pressure via linear theory of instability.

The combination of DNS and LES results will attempt to address following key questions with respect to hydrogen-rich fuel burning at high pressure: what different regimes of turbulent combustion can be identified; in a given regime what is the instantaneous spatial structure of the flame; can the local properties of the instantaneous flame be characterised by a few variables; and finally how can a statistical model be constructed based on a characterisation of the instantaneous flame structure. Better answers to these questions will enable the development of predictive multi-scale models to optimally design future evolving fuels and engines.

If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Dr. Ranga Dinesh Kahanda Koralage, Energy Technology research group, Email: Dinesh.kahanda-koralage<στο>soton.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 8301.

Funding information: This project is in competition with others for the associated funding. The funding covers EU/UK fees and stipend. 

This project is run through participation in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling (http://ngcm.soton.ac.uk). For details of our 4 Year PhD programme, please see http://www.findaphd.com/search/PhDDetails.aspx?CAID=331&LID=2652.