Welcome to
The University of Sydney
Clean Combustion Research Group

The Clean Combustion Research Group at the University of Sydney in the School of Aerospace Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering is firmly committed to the long term development of reliable numerical tools that will be used in the design and optimisation of engineering problems that typically involve turbulent flows, chemical reactions, heat transfer and particle dynamics. Flows of interest may involve single-phase gases of various fuels or two-phase sprays.

Our long term objective is to facilitate the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to become a predictive an established predictive tool in combustion engineering applications. Advanced numerical approaches such as Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are gradually becoming more feasible alternatives to standard RANS methods particularly when used with more sophisticated physical sub-models such as multi-variate flamelets, Conditional Moment Closure and probability density functions.

Such approaches need further developments to enable them to account for complex flows, new fuels (such as bio-fuels), and transient processes that involve significant turbulence-chemistry and/or droplet-flow-chemistry interactions. The optimal path for progress here is the close interaction between calculations and detailed measurements in well-designed burners that hold representative yet sufficiently simple flames that lend themselves to modelling. This has been a consistent theme of the research conducted by the Clean Combustion Group such that the resulting measurements have significantly advanced knowledge in turbulent combustion and the data bases produced have become international benchmarks for model validation. Burners adopted by international communities such as the TNF and TCS Workshops include the piloted burner, bluff-body and swirl-stabilised burners, piloted premixed burner in vitiated co-flows and the spray burner.

Experimental facilities in the Clean Combustion Laboratory are state-of-the-art and include advanced laser diagnostic methods such as imaging of Mie, Rayleigh and Raman scattering, and laser induced fluorescence (LIF) of selected species. High-speed imaging of velocity fields using particles imaging velocimetry (HS-PIV) as well as high-speed LIF imaging of species such as OH (HS-LIF-OH) are also available.

Collaboration with other leading groups in turbulent combustion and laser diagnostic laboratories around the world is also strong. Examples of such long-standing collaborations include elite universities such as Cornell, Cambridge and Darmstadt as well as Sandia National Laboratories at Livermore, California.