Dr. Ankit Dilip Kumar is a Henslow Fellow at Robinson College and works in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His research is on thermoacoustic and hydrodynamic instabilities in turbulent reacting flows, with applications in the energy and aerospace sectors.
With over 80% of global energy derived from combustion of carbon-based sources, retrofitting existing technology to burn zero-carbon fuels like hydrogen is a cost-effective strategy for decarbonising the energy sector. However, gas turbine combustion faces significant challenges from thermoacoustic instabilities, a two-way coupling between heat and pressure that can cause destructive vibrations. Ankit’s work focuses on understanding these interactions in hydrogen-fuelled systems, modelling them through numerical simulations, and finding mitigation strategies using techniques prevalent in the study of nonlinear dynamical systems.
Long-term exposure to aircraft noise is linked to insomnia, which can result in cognitive decline and mental health issues. Ankit’s research also includes modelling direct combustion noise from aircraft engines, with particular attention to the link between noise and common hydrodynamic instabilities in gas-turbine combustors. This link enables the development of simple, cost-effective models for predicting noise and designing inherently silent combustors.
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The fundamental laws of physics look different when reflected in a mirror. This is the statement that the laws of physics have a handedness, what physicists call chirality. This is one of the most important facts that we know about the universe, a fact that, remarkably, goes a long way to fixing the mathematical structure of the laws of nature. I will explain how we know about this handedness, why it’s so important, and why there are still several chiral mysteries that remain unsolved.
Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
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