Profile
Prof Nedunchezhian SWAMINATHAN
Principal Investigator
Prof Nedunchezhian Swaminathan is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His work is predominantly on modelling and simulation of turbulent flows with multi-physics, including density stratification, chemical reactions, and magnetic & electric fields. His work also spans combustion chemistry and developing skeletal and reduced mechanisms for alternative fuels. The computer codes developed in his group are being used by industries such as Siemens, Mitsubishi for their in-house evaluations of their combustor designs for both emission and thermoacoustic characteristics at elevated pressures and temperatures.
Cambridge
Researchers
HYCOMBS
Research Interest
Thermo-fluids science and engineering: Thermodynamics, Mathematical modelling and computations of turbulent flows, turbulent combustion, computational combustion, kinetic mechanism reduction, interaction of turbulence and chemistry, fluid dynamics, sound emissions from flames, combustion instability, heat transfer, magneto-hydrodynamics.
Geophysical flows: atmospheric boundary layers, stratified flows, tropical cyclones, cloud physics, Applications: gas turbines, explosions, high-speed combustion.
Machine learning: Application of ML to multi-physics flows.
Key Publications
Google Scholar Link
J. C. Massey, I. Langella and N. Swaminathan, “A scaling law for the recirculation zone length behind a bluff body in reacting flows,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 875, pp. 699–724, 2019. doi: 10.1017/jfm.2019.475.
N. Swaminathan, “Physical insights on MILD combustion from DNS,” Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering, vol. 5, 2019. doi: 10.3389/fmech.2019.00059.
C. Ezenwajiaku, M. Talibi, N. A. K. Doan, N. Swaminathan and R. Balachandran, “Study of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in hydrogen-enriched methane diffusion flames,” International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, vol. 44, no. 14, pp. 7642–7655, 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2019.01.253.
A. T. Etchie et al., “Burn to kill: Wood ash a silent killer in Africa,” Science of The Total Environment, vol. 748, p. 141 316, 2020. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141316.
M. Zhao, Z. X. Chen, H. Zhang and N. Swaminathan, “Large eddy simulation of a supersonic lifted hydrogen flame with perfectly stirred reactor model,” Combustion and Flame, vol. 230, p. 111 441, 2021. doi: 10.1016/j.combustflame.2021.111441.
Z. X. Chen, N. Swaminathan, M. Mazur, N. A. Worth, G. Zhang and L. Li, “Numerical investigation of azimuthal thermoacoustic instability in a gas turbine model combustor,” Fuel, vol. 339, p. 127 405, 2023. doi: 10.1016/j.fuel.2023.127405.
Achievements
2023 Fellow of Cambridge Philosophical Society
2023 Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society
2018 Fellow of the Combustion Institute
2018 Distinguished lecture award, IISc, India
2011 Sugden Award from the British Section of the Combustion Institute for the paper ‘Heat release rate correlation and combustion noise in premixed flames,’ DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2011.232