Combining Multiscale Physics and Data for Complex Reacting Systems in Energy and the Environment
Welcome to the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Seminar!
Join us for an exciting event where industry experts share insights on the latest trends in mechanical and aerospace engineering. This hybrid event will take place at TBD so mark your calendars and don’t miss out! Whether you’re a student, professional, or simply curious about these fields, this seminar is a great opportunity to network, learn, and stay up to date. Come be a part of this engaging experience and expand your horizons in the world of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
About the Lecture
Understanding, predicting, and controlling complex reacting systems would be invaluable to varied scientific and engineering disciplines, ranging from enabling future energy, aerospace, and chemical processing/materials manufacturing technologies to understanding the Earth’s atmosphere and the potential origins of life beyond Earth. Yet, unraveling and reliably predicting complex reacting systems—which often involve hundreds of intermediate species and thousands of intermediate reactions—are notoriously challenging tasks. A common theme is that physics and data from a single scale are rarely sufficient to enable definitive explanations and reliable predictions. For example, purely macroscopic reaction models are often too inaccurate to be used as predictive design tools for engineering devices like gas turbine engines. Fortunately, modern computational chemistry, data science, and automation provide new opportunities to overcome such challenges, especially when these elements are integrated within a holistic multiscale physics-based, data-driven approach.
These themes will be illustrated primarily via our studies of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions during carbon-free fuel combustion, which is a major technical challenge for gas turbine engines powered by renewable fuels (H2 and NH3) as part of a stable, sustainable electrical grid. To illustrate the generality of these ideas, our applications to other domains (e.g., atmospheric photochemistry and PFAS destruction) will also be explored. I will close with the notion of linking automated versions of the methods discussed to create an autonomous cyber-physical scientific community of experimentalists, theoreticians, and modelers that could unlock new possibilities in the pace and depth of scientific progress in complex reacting systems.
About the Speaker
Michael P. Burke is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where he also holds an affiliate appointment in the Data Science Institute. Prior to joining Columbia in 2014, Burke earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2011 at Princeton University, where he was a Wallace Memorial Honorific Fellow, and he worked as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Burke is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, the Combustion Institute’s Research Excellence Award, the Combustion Institute’s Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award, and the American Chemical Society’s PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award. His publications have been featured in the “News and Views” section of Nature Chemistry, selected as the Feature Article in Combustion and Flame, and chosen for the Distinguished Paper Award at the 31st International Symposium on Combustion.
Visitor Information
This event is open to NYU students, faculty, and staff.
📍 Location: 1 Metrotech Center
📍 Location: Jacobs seminar room
Link: Students, please reach out to Brian McNiff (bm3155@nyu.edu) for the zoom link