Biography
Dr Matthew P. Juniper is a Professor in the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge, U.K. He studied Natural Sciences Part 1 (1994) and Engineering Part 2 (1997) at the University of Cambridge and received his M.S (1998) and PhD (2001) from the Ecole Centrale de Paris. After a period as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. (2002-2003) he joined the University of Cambridge as a lecturer (2003) and fellow of Trinity College (2006). His research interests include nonlinearity and non-normality in thermoacoustic systems, local and global stability analyses of hydrodynamic flows, and adjoint-based methods for optimization and continuation analysis.
Research
Matthew Juniper's research is in the broad area of flow instability, encompassing hydrodynamic instability and thermoacoustic instability. This research is inspired by developments in the analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems and the analysis of linear stability with adjoint methods. Its broad aim it to take concepts that have been proven for simple systems and scale them up into tools that can be used in industry.
The main application of this research is in gas turbine combustion chambers, which are susceptible to both hydrodynamic and thermoacoustic oscillations. As manufacturers strive to make engines that are cleaner and more fuel-efficient, they operate closer to the boundaries of instability. The aim of this research is to predict these instability boundaries, to analyse the behaviour beyond these boundaries, and to work out how such systems can be stabilized.
This research also has other applications, such as reducing the noise in cyclone separators, and retaining laminar flow in low Reynolds number furnaces, which could be important for the fabrication of certain new materials.
