Guest Seminar: Exploring Emerging Technologies for Future Energy Conversion and Propulsion Systems

IN PERSON EVENT ONLY  (restricted to UniMelb staff and students only)

The Melbourne Energy Institute invites you to a guest seminar by Professor Frank Eulitz of von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamic, Belgium.

Turbomachinery plays a crucial role in power plants across various sectors, including aerospace, aircraft, industrial plants, and data centers. It is a well-established domain in research and development, industry, and the market. Overall, turbomachinery contributes to nearly 40% of global energy conversion.

While AI, machine learning, and additive manufacturing are rapidly advancing technologies already impacting our daily lives, the green hydrogen economy and quantum computing are emerging on a more distant horizon. However, they bear equally disruptive potential for future energy conversion and propulsion systems.

In the first part of the talk, state-of-the-art experimental and numerical methodologies for applied research on turbomachinery and propulsion technologies are reviewed and contextualized with the demand for innovation. In the second part, explorative activities and initial achievements in integrating emergent technologies— additive manufacturing, multi-disciplinary optimization, and quantum computing—into the mature R&D field of aero-thermal turbomachinery are discussed.

Attendees of the seminar will gain an overview of state-of-the-art research in turbomachinery and propulsion, and learn about exemplified approaches to exploring emergent technologies. The talk aims to encourage exploration and creative approaches, while also prompting critical thinking about often-hyped emergent technologies.

SPEAKERS:

Professor Frank Eulitz

Head of the Turbomachinery and Propulsion Department

von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamic

Belgium

Frank Eulitz is a Professor and the Head of the Turbomachinery & Propulsion Department at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics. With a solid industrial background in gas turbine R&D and innovation management, he is committed to exploring emerging technologies that will drive future innovations in energy conversion and propulsion.

Professor Eulitz teaches courses in Aero-Thermodynamics of Turbomachinery & Propulsion, Unsteady Phenomena in Turbomachinery, and Project Management in Research & Development.
He studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Arizona. He received an award-winning Doctorate from the University of Bochum while leading the Numerical Simulation group at the DLR German Aerospace Center. He also earned an Executive MBA in General Management from the European School of Management & Technology in Berlin while serving as a department manager at Siemens Energy.

MODERATOR:

Professor Richard Sandberg

Chair of Computational Mechanics, Department of Mechanical Engineering

University of Melbourne

Richard Sandberg is Chair of Computational Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His main interest is in high-fidelity simulation of turbulent flows and the associated noise generation in order to gain physical understanding of flow and noise mechanisms and to help assess and improve low-order models that can be employed in an industrial context. 

He has been awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT190100072) for 2020-2024 to continue developing his simulation and machine-learning capabilities to better understand and model turbulent flows and flow-generated noise.

Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, he was a Professor of Fluid Dynamics and Aeroacoustics in the Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics research group at the University of Southampton and headed the UK Turbulence Consortium (www.turbulence.ac.uk), coordinating the work packages for compressible flows and flow visualisations and databases.