Biography

Venkat Raman received his PhD from Iowa State University in the department of chemical engineering, and was a NASA/Center for Turbulence Research Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Prior to joining University of Michigan, he was on the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin. He now serves as a tenured professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Raman received an NSF CAREER award in 2008, a distinguished paper award at the International Combustion Symposium in 2013, and he held the Eli. H and Ramona Thornton Centennial Fellow in Engineering at UT Austin from 2013-2014. He is a recipient of the George J. Huebener, Jr. Research Excellence Award from the University of Michigan. He was elected Fellow of the Combustion Institute in 2022, and serves as an Associate Editor of Combustion and Flame as well as the AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power. In his time as a faculty member, Raman has advised/currently advising 40 PhD/MS students, and has published more than 150 peer reviewed articles in archival journals and conferences. Raman’s research interests lie in the broad area of computational propulsion, but has more recently focused on detonation engines and scramjet-based hypersonic propulsion.

Detonation engines, using continuous spinning or rotating waves, are finding use in a broad spectrum of propulsion applications. While research in this area span more than five decades, details of the complex detonation process have been emerging only in the last couple of decades. Such engines involve the three-dimensional interplay of flow geometry and unsteady fuel/air injection, stratified mixtures, and complex wave dynamics including multiple and even counter-propagating structures. Due to the multiscale nature of these problems, computational modeling using even the most powerful computing systems still remains a challenge. In this talk, progress in the detailed representation of single and two-phase detonation configurations, insights learnt, and key challenges are discussed. 

Biography

Dr. Nabiha CHAUMEIX, director of ICARE, a full-body CNRS laboratory, has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering (University of Orléans, 1993). She was president of the Institute of Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems (IDERS, 2017-2022) and is actually deputy director of the French Research Network on Soot. Dr Chaumeix has over 25 years of experience in the flame dynamics, explosions safety and combustion chemical kinetics. The research developed by Dr Chaumeix is related to: (i) high temperature chemical kinetics using shock tubes and has devoted more than a decade in the study of soot formation from heavy fuels; (ii) the determination of the combustion fundamental properties such as flammability limits, laminar flame velocities, auto-ignition delay times, detonation characteristics (cell size, detonation speed, etc.) and the development of detailed chemical kinetics applicable to these phenomena; (iii) assessment of Safety explosion criteria with the detailed study of flame acceleration covering both subsonic and supersonic flames. The research is developed in the framework of National projects (ANR- HYDROMEL, MITHYGENE, IRSIS, SYTCOM, PHYSSA, PEPR-H2-ESKHYMO & AIDHY), European projects (SiA-TEAM, ARCHER, AMHYCO, FUN-PM, SASPAM-SA), International projects (EIG CONCERT-JAPAN 2021-STACY) and in several projects with different industries and institutions (TotalEnergies, IRSN, EDF, AREVA, Air Liquide, CNES, CEA, …etc.).