The aerospace carbon footprint is increasingly concerning. In the near term, sustainable and carbon-neutral fuels are in high demand to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, the ideal future aerospace vehicle will be integrated with highly efficient and high-speed propulsion devices using clean and renewable energy sources.
My core research is to advance aerospace sustainability and high-speed aerospace vehicle design through multiscale reacting flow modeling. I am particularly interested in understanding sustainable aviation fuel and hydrogen combustion and synthetic pathways, and the underlying low- and high-speed reacting flow physics in both current aerospace propulsion devices and future carbon-neutral, high-speed vehicles.
Additionally, my research takes a horozontal expansion into computational materials and chemistry interaction. Specifically, I aim to establish a quantum-chemistry-guided, multiscale modeling approach for sustainable and energy harvesting materials design.
2. Research Directions
Specific interests:
Aerospace sustainability:
Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) combustion and emission
SAF chemical design and synthetis
Other sustainable energy carriers (e.g., hydrogen, ammonia)
Avaition environmental impacts
High-speed reacting flow:
Nonequilibrium aerothermochemistry
Ultrafast chemistry and kinetics in high-speed reacting flows
Light-harvesting, stress-responsive, and battery materials
3. Research Approach
I work in the interdisciplinary area bridging GPU-based quantum chemistry, chemical kinetics, fluid mechanics and gas dynamics, with the aid of machine learning and data-driven methods. I develop multiscale computational approach for reacting flows across different time and length scales, featuring interactions between the microscopic, molecular scale (e.g., fast chemistry and thermal nonequilibrium) and the macroscopic, flow scale (e.g., shock, boundary layer, and turbulent flow).
An example on applying fast quantum chemistry modeling for reacting flow simulation is highlighted in one of my past work ( R. Xu, et al., Chem. Sci., 14, 7447-7464, 2023. [Link])
