April 13, 2015 Javier Urzay, Engineering Research Associate

SEMINAR
Department of Aerospace Engineering
Multiscale and multiphysical aspects of energy
deployment in chemically-reacting flows
Monday, April 13, 2015, 11:45 a.m. | HRBB 702
Javier Urzay
Engineering Research Associate
Stanford University Center for Turbulence Research
jurzay@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The focus of this presentation will be on hydrodynamic phenomena introduced by the release
of energy in chemically-reacting flows. The scope of this challenging topic is undoubtedly broad
and is related to -for instance- the concomitant generation of kinetic energy from explosions,
detonations, deflagrations, burning sprays, lasers, plasmas, fueled particles, swimmers,
and molecular motors. In all those scenarios, velocity disturbances, oftentimes non-linearly coupled with the energydeployment dynamics, are generated from energy transfer across multiple scales. In particular, I will elaborate on two
computational investigations that illustrate some aspects of these phenomena in relatively complex flows: The inter-scale
energy-transfer dynamics in turbulent combustion, and the conversion of electromagnetic energy into detrimental flows
in plasma-assisted adaptive lenses for aero-optics.
BIO
Javier is an Engineering Research Associate at the Stanford University Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) since
2012. At CTR he has worked on multidisciplinary problems related to combustion, plasmas, particle-laden flows,
microhydrodynamics, and uncertainty quantification. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mechanical Engineering
in 2005 from the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering in 2010
from the University of California San Diego, where he graduated with a number of high distinctions in teaching and
research. For his Ph.D. thesis, Javier worked on fundamental problems in theoretical fluid mechanics and combustion
physics under the guidance of Prof. Forman A. Williams. After graduation, he was a postdoctoral fellow for one year
at the french computational fluid dynamics laboratory CERFACS in Toulouse, where he worked on spray combustion
instabilities in turbopropulsion
Figure 1: OH (red) and density gradient (solid) contours in
a supersonic H2/Air mixing layer.
Figure 2: Electron density and
axial vorticity isocontours in a
plasma lens.