The performance of combustion engines that use liquid fuels depends on the way in which the liquid fuel is aerosolised and mixed prior to combustion. This is true for internal combustion engines to aircraft gas turbines to large rocket motors. Our research group in the Laboratory for Turbulence Research in Aerospace & Combustion (LTRAC) at Monash University studies the fundamental physics of spray atomisation, the process by which liquid jets break up into small droplets. We approach this complex problem in a variety of ways, looking at the smallest scales – individual droplets – up to very large scales involved scale models of injectors used in hybrid and liquid rocket motors.

PhD and Masters projects studying primary liquid atomisation and secondary droplet atomisation are available.