Watching droplets, powders and flames through experiments can shed light on the physics of dispersion, mixing and reaction, and generate fun as you try to answer the question of why things behave as observed.
The engineering problems that provide the driving force behind my research will lead to a random walk through flows in burners of coal powder, the production of detergent powder, the combustion of liquid fuels in engines, cleaning food production tanks, and the dispersion of droplets in rain clouds and rocket engines.
The talk will demonstrate the intriguing commonality of the physics behind these diverse applications and, at the same time, the complexity that limits our ability to predict flow and reaction. The talk will emphasise the importance of experiments in understanding the ‘real’ physics and how combining theory with ‘observing by watching’ can lead to innovative future developments.
Biography
Yannis Hardalupas graduated from National Technical University of Athens in Greece with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1984 and received his PhD degree from Imperial College London in 1989. Despite London’s weather, he remained at Imperial where he was appointed Professor of Multiphase Flows in 2009. He was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship for experimental research on the combustion of liquid and solid fuels and an industrial secondment to Ricardo Consulting Engineers from the Royal Academy of Engineering to develop computational models for atomizing liquid fuels.
He is currently on the Committees of the Combustion Physics group of the Institute of Physics and the British Section of the Combustion Institute. In addition to his contributions in the area of combustion, liquid atomization and sprays, the development of novel optical techniques has led to patents for instruments on powder sizing, planar droplet sizing and nanoparticle sizing.
Vote of Thanks: Dr John Moran, Rolls-Royce, and Professor Jim McGuirk, University of Loughborough