Chemical Kinetics

Course content: Fundamentals of combustion-specific thermodynamics and chemical kinetics; Generation of kinetic mechanisms of varying fidelity, range of validity, and typical use case in combustion modeling and simulations; Chemical reactors for the development and validation of kinetic mechanisms. Combustion regimes: important reactions and fuel specificities.

Bio: Dr. Pepiot is currently an Associate Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, USA. She has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and a M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Ecole Nationale Superieure de l’Aeronautique et de l’Espace (Supaero) in Toulouse, France. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty in 2011, Dr. Pepiot held a research scientist position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, US, on Biomass Gasification Process Modeling and Optimization. Dr. Pepiot’s main interest is in developing new modeling and computational tools to improve the description of complex chemical processes in CFD simulations of energy systems, especially in combustion and sustainability. She is currently an associate editor for the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, and has an active role in the Combustion Institute leadership at the local (Eastern States), US, and International levels.

Experimental Diagnostics

Course content: The course will cover the fundamentals of optical diagnostics for high temperature combustion and reacting flows. We will cover principles of measurement science, light sources and signal detection methods, light-molecule interactions. We will then cover incoherent techniques, including scattering and particle velocimetry, Rayleigh and Raman scattering, absorption, laser-induced fluorescence, phosphorescence and incandescence. Finally, we will cover coherent non-linear techniques, including coherent Anti-Stokes and Laser-Induced Grating spectroscopy

Bio: Simone Hochgreb is a Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her main research interests are in understanding processes in combustion and reacting flows, as relevant to power conversion and industrial processes. She has co-authored around 200 journal publications in engine and gas turbine combustion, reacting flows, measurement methods and thermoacoustics.

Her recent interests are in the application of optical diagnostics to the measurements of temperatures and species in turbulent flames, hydrogen combustion, thermoacoustics, aerosols and flame synthesis. She is a Fellow of the Combustion Institute, and of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration.

She holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of São Paulo, and a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University.

Turbulent Combustion: A Computational Perspective

Course content: This course provides an overview of turbulent combustion from the perspective of numerical simulation. The course will cover fundamentals of premixed, partially premixed and non-premixed combustion and describe numerical methods for simulation of turbulent combustion on high-performance computing at the exascale. Reduced order modeling strategies to accelerate first principles direct numerical simulations of ‘turbulence-chemistry’ interactions will be described. Exemplars of simulations of canonical and laboratory-scale flames using alternative fuels will be presented in the context of power generation and transportation.

Bio: Jacqueline H. Chen is a Senior Scientist at the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Laboratories. She has contributed broadly to research in turbulent combustion elucidating ‘turbulence-chemistry’ interactions in combustion through direct numerical simulations. To achieve scalable performance of DNS on heterogeneous computer architectures she led an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, applied mathematicians and computational scientists to develop an exascale direct numerical simulation capability for turbulent reactive flows with complex chemistry and multi-physics. She has also contributed to reduced order modeling to accelerate DNS with complex chemistry. She is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Combustion Institute and the American Physical Society. She is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA.

Two-phase Combustion

Course content: The correct treatment of the heat and transfer process in spray flows is necessary to allow the accurate prediction of the mixture composition and state at a specific region and at a specific time. To address such a demand, Large Eddy Simulation has been demonstrated as a feasible approach. In this short-course, a description of the main models and those found in the so-called state-of-the-art for representing heat and mass transfer in droplets is presented. Gradually, the topic evolves to the interaction of droplets with reactive flows until reaching turbulent spray combustion. The course is structured so that participants will be able to identify the main physical phenomena underlying spray combustion and the demands for their correct representation in applications based on computational fluid dynamics.

Bio: Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Escola Politécnica da USP. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Polytechnic School of USP and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He is currently a member of the scientific committee of the Rede Nacional de Combustão (RNC) – Brazilian section of “The Combustion Institute” and of the Combustion Executive Committee of ABCM. In 2024 he became the deputy director of the GHG Program of the Research Center for Innovation in Greenhouse Gases (RCGI). He develops research work as a member of the Thermal and Environmental Engineering Laboratory (LETE) and the Technological Characterization Laboratory (LCT). He develops work and supervises students in the following lines of research: combustion of sprays, heat and mass transfer in mono- and multi-component droplets, flame-turbulence-spray interaction, FGM reaction reduction method, LES approach, and combustion processes associated with carbon capture and storage (CCS) such as Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC).

Biomass Combustion

Course content: Biomass energetic context; Biomass sources: definitions and classifications; Biomass properties; Thermochemical biomass decomposition: Chemical analysis and Combustion (mass and energy balance); Particle scale combustion; Packed-bed scale combustion; Full scale combustion: Domestic technology and Industrial scale; Emissions and treatment technologies; Future trends scope.

Bio: Technical Industrial Engineer in Mechanics (UVigo, 2003). Industrial Engineer (UVigo, 2006). PhD from the University of Vigo in 2009. Associate Professor at the University since 2014. His teaching career began in 2007 and is primarily focused on Thermal Engineering and Thermal Engines and Turbomachinery. His research interests include biomass combustion and other low-scale thermal generation systems, as well as emission reduction in these systems.

He is the co-author of more than 60 JCR-indexed articles, over 45 contributions to national and international conferences, and has participated in more than 20 funded research projects and/or collaborations with industry. He has undertaken research stays abroad at Edith Cowan University (Australia) and the University of Ostrava (Czech Republic).

He has supervised/co-supervised over 30 BSc thesis and 50 MSc thesis. He serves as a reviewer for JCR journals (ATE, Fuel, Energy and Fuels…) and has been an expert evaluator for the Agencia Nacional de Evaluación y Prospectiva (ANEP) since 2013.