Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Clean Combustion Research Center, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Dr. Magnotti holds a Ph.D. from George Washington University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Sandia National Laboratories before joining KAUST in 2016. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, affiliated with the Clean Combustion Research Center. Dr. Magnotti’s main research interests are the development and the application of laser diagnostics to study turbulent combustion and enable novel combustion strategies that will contribute to reducing CO2 and pollutant emissions. Research activities include the development of novel laser diagnostics techniques, the experimental investigation of turbulent oxyfuel and ammonia flames, supersonic combustion, and high-efficiency internal combustion engines.
Advanced Laser Diagnostics for Ammonia Combustion
Ammonia has attracted great attention in recent years, as a carbon-free fuel for power generation, transportation, furnaces, and boilers. Despite high interest from the combustion community in ammonia as a fuel, quantitative measurements of the thermochemical structure in turbulent ammonia-air flame, at conditions relevant to practical applications are very limited. Such data are of great importance as they give greater insight into the role of turbulence-chemistry interaction, preferential diffusion, and in-situ decomposition, and provide much-needed data for validation of numerical models. 1D Raman scattering is the diagnostics of choice for measurements of the thermochemical structure of non-sooting turbulent flames. Although ammonia/hydrogen/air flames are sooting-free, there are no published Raman measurements in these flames. Experiments at KAUST have highlighted three major obstacles to the implementation of the technique: 1) the strong flame luminosity in the same spectral region of the Raman signal; 2) fluorescence interference on the Raman signal; 3) the lack of theoretical or experimental models of ammonia spectra. The talk will describe our approach to overcoming these obstacles, and it will present the first measurements of temperature, major species and NO in a series of counterflow laminar flames, and turbulent diffusion flames.