High efficiency hydrogen engine concepts for zero emission power and propulsion

There is renewed interest in hydrogen as an essential and long-term fuel to reduce air pollution and carbon emissions from the energy sector. The use of hydrogen in clean combustion engines has emerged as a viable route for the decarbonisation of key energy applications in power generation and transportation applications. 

However, the large difference in reactivity of hydrogen from traditional fuels challenges the hydrogen combustion engine development. Accurate numerical predictive models are then required to address engineering challenges of future highly efficient and zero-emission hydrogen combustion engine development. 

You will join the Energy Technology Research Group based within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. You will develop and apply physics-based numerical models to investigate high efficiency hydrogen combustion engine concepts for zero-emission power and propulsion. You will use a computational fluids dynamics (CFD) based modelling approach for chemically reacting flow simulation coupling fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and combustion, heat transfer. 

To achieve higher thermal efficiency and low emissions you will study novel methods for:

• hydrogen combustion engine mixture formation
• ignition
• combustion and heat release
• pollutant emissions 
• operational modes

This project aims to map novel design guidelines for future high efficiency low emission hydrogen combustion engine concepts for large capacity combustion engines for power generation and transportation applications.