Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar

Kaust Zoom meeting ID: 968 3265 8219 (Requires fast registration)

Or go directly to: https://kaust.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIldOuuqzMoG913NaIqUf8w-5gnSphrhVLD

Abstract

When studying the properties of systems in nature and technology, we often look at their eigenvalues and eigenfunctions because they tell us something about how the system evolves and how it responds to external perturbations. For many technical applications, such an analysis is important to guarantee safety and operability. When dealing with complex systems, however, this is often a challenging task. A prominent example are thermoacoustic oscillations, an undesirable phenomenon that occurs in many combustion devices. I will discuss in this talk how these instabilities manifest in gas turbine engines, and how we can use tools that originated from the field of quantum mechanics to aid the spectral analysis of such systems. The analogies we draw upon largely revolve around spatial symmetries, which can be found in many configurations of technical relevance.

Bio

Jonas Moeck is an Associate Professor in the Department of Energy and Process Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He received engineering degrees from the University of Michigan and the Technical University Berlin, a PhD from the latter institution and was a postdoctoral scholar at Ecole Centrale Paris. His research interests include combustion of carbon-free fuels, flame dynamics, combustion control, low-order modeling and stability analysis, and plasma-assisted combustion.