Research

A major focus of UHPC-lab is to attack the bottleneck challenges hampering SAF implementation in air transportation, so as to facilitate green aviation and hence carbon neutraulity. Toward this, we focus on two important aspects that can bring instant carbon reduction across the entire aviation sector, namely SAF and SAF-based aeroengine technologies.

The desire of mankind to explore furtherer and deeper into the space has been more imminent than ever. We dedicate ourselves to these interstellar explorations via formulating high-performance propellants and space propulsion systems. Our research encompasses solid, liquid and hybrid propellants and their applications in rockets, spacecrafts, satellites, space launch vehicles, missiles and other civilian applications.

Machine learning is a powerful tool that can be leveraged to greatly expand the capabilities of optimization frameworks. At UHPC-lab, we fully exploit state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to develop real-time optimization frameworks in high-dimensional spaces. The immediate application of such frameworks is to develop high-fidelity, large-scale chemistry models to enable meaningful predictive combustion modelling.

Planet climate is largely driven by atmospheric chemistry, which, by its nature, is highly dynamic and changes with natural processes such as volcano emissions, lightening, and, specifically on earth, human activities. Some of the changes have potential to facilitate planetary exploration, while others can be harmful to human health and planet ecosystems. We focus on understanding the underlying chemistry and physics governing atmospheric developments.

Success of the electrical vehicle industry has been seriously challenged by the safety concerns related to battery fire incidents. To facilitate the take-up of this technology, we’re developing flame retardants that can minimize fire development during battery failures.

Implementation of safe, reliable and high-performance combustion-powered energy systems requires as a prerequisite a thorough understanding of the fundamental physics and chemistry governing the combustion process therein. We have developed state-of-the-art diagnostic platforms that allow us to characterize these fundamentals through theoretical, modelling and experimental frameworks.

Facilities

UHP-RCM & HRR-Tof-ms platform

The first-of-its-kind platform couples a customized Ultra-High-Pressure Rapid Compression Machine (video and bottom left figure) and a High-Repetition-Rate Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (top left figure), enabling characterization of fuel pyrolysis, oxidation and autoignion at 600–1400 K, 1–1000 bar, various equivalence ratios and diluent ratios, which is ideal to study atmospheric to supercritical chemistry.

In addition, heat release rate can be robustly extracted from recorded pressure-time histories.

This platform can be used to study the combustion characteristics of gaseous, liquid and solid fuels at conditions representative of heavy-duty, gas turbine and rocket engines.

The Flat flame burner
platform

The platform integrates a McKenna Burner, a gas-feeding system, a gaseous and particle sampling system, a thermal imaging system and a water-cooling system.

The downstream analyzers can accurately determine the emissions from the flame, including NOx, UHC, CO, CO2 and soot.

The platform can be used to detect the off-gas limits of SOFC systems, the carbon damping effect at anodes, laminar flame speed measurement, flame emission measurements. In addition, an infrared camera is used to capture the thermal field of the flame.

The "Holthuis and Associates Flat Flame Burner", referred to as McKenna Burner, is ideal for quality combustion analysis.

Flow Reactor
& Micro-GC Platform

The platform combines a fused silica flow reactor, a gas-feeding system, a gas sampling system, and a Micro-GC.

The flow reactor is able to generate a fully premixed homogeneous mixture with well-controlled temperature. The gas-feedings system can supply different gaseous into the reactor inlet at various flow rates. The Micro-GC can detect and analyze the concentration of different species from the extracted samples.

With this platform, pyrolysis and oxidation of gaseous and liquid fuels can be characterized at various temperatures and residence times.

Real-time

high-speed imaging Platform

The high-speed imaging platform combines two high-speed cameras, a Photron SA-Z high-speed camera mounted with a Questar QM-100 lens and a Chronos 2.1 high-speed camera from Kron Technologies equipped with a TCLO lens.

With the platform, droplet impact dynamics including coalescence, bouncing, partial coalescence, reflexive separation, etc., can be recorded at up to 40000 fps with a spatial resolution of 1024×512.

High-pressure laser-induced flame & soot imaging platform

The High-Pressure Flame/Soot Imaging platform couples a customized High-Pressure Burner Chamber, two counter-positioned McKenna Burners, a Laser System, and an Imaging System.

The laser system includes a PRO-290-10 Primary Nd: YAG Laser, a INDI-40-10-HG Secondary Nd: YAG Laser, and a PSCAN-LG-24-EG Tunable DYE Laser. The imaging system includes a “Princeton Instruments” PM4-1024I-SB-FG-18-P46 Intensified CCD Camera and an “Andor” iStar DH334T Intensified CCD Camera.

The platform enables PLIF and LII detection, which can be used to characterize the flame dynamics and soot/PAH characteristics at 1–100 bar.

super-computing platform

The platform includes a PILOT Supercomputing Platform (10 nodes, 4 TB memory) and a BUDA Supercomputing Platform (60 nodes, 12 TB memory), with over 3000 CPU cores and 20 GPU cards.

With the platform, high-accuracy quantum chemistry calculations, molecular dynamics calculations, quantum mechanics calculations can be efficiently conducted.