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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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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