Project overview

The performance of combustion engines that use liquid fuels depends on the way in which the fuel is aerosolised and mixed prior to combustion. This is true for internal combustion engines to aircraft gas turbines to large rocket motors.

Our research group in the Laboratory for Turbulence Research in Aerospace & Combustion (LTRAC) at Monash University studies the fundamental physics of spray atomisation, the process by which liquid streams break up into small droplets.

We approach this complex problem in a variety of ways, looking at the smallest scales – individual droplets – up to very large scales involved scale models of injectors used in hybrid and liquid rocket motors. We investigate how droplet and spray atomisation is influenced by turbulence and thermodynamic effects, which will enable the development of improved spray technologies spanning medical inhaler devices through to rocket motor injectors.