New Faculty Member Studies Turbulence, Combustion Instabilities

8/31/2014 Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

Assistant Prof. Taraneh Sayadi will bring to AE expertise in numerical analysis of complex turbulent flow and thermoacoustic instabilities.

Written by Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

 

Taraneh Sayadi
Taraneh Sayadi
 

Having established numerical analysis research into turbulent flow, Taraneh Sayadi is now expanding her studies by examining combustion instabilities, optimization and control as she begins her faculty career at Aerospace Engineering at Illinois this fall.

 

Sayadi’s research has focused on the direct and large eddy simulation of complex turbulent flows with the objective of designing reduced-order models and control strategies. She is also interested in thermoacoustic instabilities relevant to energy conversion and transportation systems, as well as data-driven spectral analysis techniques and their integration with large-scale data processing tools.

Her husband, Vincent Le Chenadec, an expert in numerical simulation and modeling of complex multi-phase flows, also will join the AE Department as a new faculty member. Both scientists will have access to Illinois’ facility, Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and the fastest supercomputer on a university campus.

In fact, the Blue Waters facility and the University of Illinois’ reputation in computer science expertise played key roles in attracting the couple to Illinois. “It’s a great combination of people who do computational work and a supercomputer to which faculty have access,” Sayadi said. “I don’t think there are many universities in the United States that offer that type of possibilities. Illinois is one of the frontrunners in doing computational work.”

 

Examples of Taraneh Sayadi's work.
Examples of Taraneh Sayadi's work.
Examples of Taraneh Sayadi's work.

Blue Waters will play an important role in advancing the frontiers of data analysis. “Blue Waters will enable us to go beyond the limits of currently existing algorithms and hardware,” she said. “One example would be to perform data-driven analysis and automatically extract the interesting features in the flow.”

 

Sayadi comes to Illinois from a position as a research associate in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College in London. Prior to that appointment, she was a postdoctoral fellow at LadHyX-E´cole Polytechnique in France.

She earned a PhD in mechanical engineering in 2012 at Stanford University, under the direction of Prof. Parviz Moin. In 2007, Sayadi earned a master’s degree in fluid mechanics from the Technical University of Munich in Germany, and, in 2005, she earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

In AE, Sayadi hopes to collaborate with Associate Prof. Dan Bodony, with expertise in aeroacoustics and computational fluid mechanics, Prof. Jonathan Freund, whose research interests include fluid mechanics and thermal sciences, and Assistant Prof. Marco Panesi, who has expertise in hypersonic flow.

 
 


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This story was published August 31, 2014.