Combustion, propulsion, aerospace, fluid dynamics, astrophysics, computational methods for fluid dynamics, high-performance computing. When I joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2019, I was joining one of the largest combustion research groups in the country and arguably the largest such group in the Northeastern US. With the combined expertise in this group and its rapid growth, I believe it is poised to become in the next 5 years one of the leading centers in energy sciences in the US, thus serving as one of the drivers of growth for the Department and the University. My goal is to contribute to this vision.

With this goal in mind, in the past year I’ve pursued several research directions. One of the focal points in the past year has been work on the fundamental research on detonation physics to support the broader Department of Defense efforts to develop detonation-based rocket engines and airbreathing hypersonic propulsors. In this context, in the past year I started work as a part of a winning team, which received the Office of Naval Research MURI award “Multiphase Detonation of Liquid Aeropropulsion Fuels.” This is a $7.5M award for 5 years with the UConn share of over $2.1M. I serve as an institutional PI from UConn on this award, which is led by Prof. Hai Wang (Stanford), and it includes team members from 6 leading universities, namely Profs. Xinyu Zhao (UConn), Venkat Raman (University of Michigan), Chloe Dedic (University of Virginia), Kareem Ahmed (University of Central Florida), and Roger Ghanem (University of Southern California). This project will represent one of the focal efforts in the nation over the next four years to advance the fundamental understanding of detonations for novel aerospace propulsion systems of relevance to the Department of Defense.

Furthermore, in support of the ongoing work in the nation on hypersonics, this year I received an ONR funding award in the amount of $660k (in collaboration with Prof. Kareem Ahmed from the University of Central Florida) to study the fundamental physics of the flow instabilities in the hypersonic propulsion systems. In addition, in collaboration with Prof. Xinyu Zhao, with support from an AFOSR DURIP award in the amount of $574k, we extended the UConn supercomputing cluster with over 2400 AMD EPYC cores and currently we are in the process of receiving a 400-core ARM storage cluster with over 1.5 petabyte storage capacity. These computing resources will significantly enhance the UConn HPC infrastructure and they will continue to support the extensive modeling efforts of detonation-based systems. All of these financial and computational resources will establish UConn over the next few years as one of the leading research centers in the nation for modeling of novel aerospace propulsion systems.

This past year I also pursued interdisciplinary research opportunities, which I view as a very important avenue to both broaden the range of scientific topics being explored and also to pursue other funding sources. In particular, I started work on a recent funding award in the amount of $556k under the NASA Astrophysics Theory Program in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. The foundation of this winning proposal was the theory of the unconfined deflagration-to-detonation transition presented in my 2019 Science paper. This project focuses on combining combustion and astrophysics research to address one of the most vexing problems in astronomy and cosmology, namely the nature of Type Ia Supernovae. Such interdisciplinary research will continue to be one of the focal points of my work.

In addition to these awards, I continued to pursue other funding opportunities. This included a proposal to the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund in the amount of $110k with the focus on modeling high-speed multi-phase reacting flows. In addition, in collaboration with the US Naval Research Laboratory, a white paper was submitted to the Department of Defense Laboratory-University Collaboration Initiative to explore the fundamental physics of the detonations and associated highly non-equilibrium reacting flows.

Overall, since joining UConn in 2019, I attracted close to $4M in funding directly to UConn in projects funded by AFOSR, ONR, and NASA. These projects involve collaborations both with scientists at UConn and at multiple leading institutions in the US. Those collaborations will continue in the coming years to pursue various funding opportunities in areas ranging from novel aerospace propulsion systems to astrophysics.

Finally, in the last year, my group and I published 4 refereed journal papers , 2 refereed conference proceedings (with my graduate students), I presented one invited seminar and co-authored 9 contributed presentations at various national meetings, all of them with my students. My team and I are also currently working on ~10 papers, including papers with our collaborators nationally and internationally, which will be submitted in the next year.

In academic year 2022/2023, I continued to engage actively both in my professional community and in the life of the Department and School of Engineering. On the professional arena, I continued to serve for the eighth year on the Editorial Board of the journal “Progress in Energy and Combustion Science” (one of the top 10 journals in Engineering, impact factor 35.34). I also was invited to join the Editorial Board of the journal "Aerospace".

This year, I continued to serve on various review panels of the federal, national, and international funding agencies, in particular National Science Foundation and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) / Department of Defense. Also in 2023, I served as an external reviewer for the Canadian national funding agency Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).

I have been actively serving as a reviewer for a number of leading international journals and publishers. In particular, I served as a reviewer for the following journals (17 reviews total in the past year): Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, Physical Review E, Aerospace, Physics of Fluids, AIAA Journal, Combustion and Flame, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

I continue to hold an Adjunct Associate Professor position at Texas A&M University. In that capacity I serve on the Ph.D. committees, and I continue to collaborate with researchers in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University.

Finally, in the past year, I also continued to actively assist the Department in various roles. In particular, I served as a chair of the departmental faculty search (two positions). I am also a member of the Faculty Retention Committee in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

In the Spring semester of the 22/23 academic year, I continued the development of a senior elective course ME 3295/5895 “Aerodynamics”, which I introduced in the Department in Spring 2021. This course is intended to serve as one of the core courses of the aerospace concentration in the Department providing students with an overview of modern theoretical aerodynamics. The enrollment continued to increase third year in a row with 47 undergraduate and 5 graduate students taking the course. In the Fall 22 semester, I also continued teaching the graduate class ME 5507, “Engineering Analysis I” with 26 students enrolled. This was the fourth time I taught this core graduate-level class.

For both of these classes, I continued to develop class content, method of delivery, and modalities of the interactions with students to ensure continued improvement in the learning outcomes. These efforts were reflected in very strong student evaluations (mean of 4.6 for Fall 2022 and 4.0 for Spring 2023) well above the Department and School averages, as well as high enrollments in courses.

Furthermore, as in previous years, I plan to continue participating in the CETL courses, which I find to be extremely insightful providing a different set of perspectives on the teaching process.

I continued to actively engage with the undergraduate students in the Department. I view such close involvement of undergraduate students in research outside of the regular class settings as vital to their training, and also extremely rewarding to me as an educator. In particular, I advised two Senior Design Projects. In the coming year, I plan to continue actively training undergraduate students in research in preparation for their future careers. Finally, I served as an academic adviser for 27 junior and senior students in the Department.

In the 22/23 academic year, I funded and supervised four graduate students: Sai Sandeep Dammati, Arnab Moitro, Abeetath Ghosh, and Calvin Colby who joined my group in the Fall of 2021 and who was previously an undergraduate student in the Department. Sai Sandeep Dammati graduated with Ph.D. from the Texas A&M University, and he is currently a postdoctoral researcher in my group at UConn. Arnab Moitro completed all course requirements, and he is expected to graduate at the end of this year. Also, I supervised another postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Chang-Hsin Chen.

Finally, I continue to be a member of a number of graduate (masters and Ph.D.) thesis committees in the Department. Thermofluids, aerospace, fluid dynamics, combustion/propulsion.