Professor Epaminondas Mastorakos

Combustion is the phenomenon at the heart of modern energy and, despite being an ancient technology, it is the least understood process of modern engineering systems, with no complete theoretical description available to this date. Turbulent combustion in particular, which is ubiquitous in all fuel-using devices, is sitting at the interface of two multi-scale non-linear phenomena: chemistry and turbulence. Professor Mastorakos's research aims to provide theories and background knowledge for combustion physics, with focus on how flames behave in gas turbines and diesel engines.

The research revolves around simulations and experiments of many kinds of flames (gaseous or liquid fuels, premixed or non-premixed), and in particular on "flames at the limit". We focus therefore on ignition and extinction phenomena that have a wide range of applications in modern low-emission engines. Our work on simulations and simulation tools includes reduced chemical mechanism construction, laminar flames, Direct Numerical Simulations of turbulent flames, and RANS and LES simulations of non-premixed reacting flows with the Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) method. Our CMC code is currently being used by various laboratories across the world. There is also experience with dispersion of reacting pollutants in the atmosphere and on aerosol modelling. On the experimental side, our work includes combustion in porous media for hydrogen production for fuel cells, auto-ignition and spark ignition of turbulent non-premixed flames, spray combustion, and blow-off of flames.