Qualifications
I graduated with a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering in 2015, specialising in unsteady shock wave dynamics. Although I left academia shortly after, I do still miss the days of running around in a grease-stained lab coat. My thesis covered three main areas:
- Design of novel shock tube apparatus — Starting from a conceptual design from my research advisor, I simulated and confirmed the feasibility of a novel shock tube apparatus that could produce imploding shock waves of an arbitrary shape. I completed the mechanical design and drew CAD drawings for the equipment, supervised manufacture of the parts, and assembled and commissioned of the equipment.
- Propagation of arbitrarily shaped shock waves — To test the limits and capabilities of the equipment, I ran simulations and experiments to produce and measure shock waves with shapes that had never been produced before. Some shapes, such as a shock wave with sharp convex corner, do not exist in nature, but the equipment was able to produce a close approximation, whose downstream behaviour matched Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations almost perfectly.
- Reflection of imploding cylindrical shock waves — The primary focus of the research was to study the reflection of converging cylindrical shock waves. Although these shock waves have a range of applications, from lithotripsy to nuclear fusion, their reflection behaviour had not been studied in detail as these shock waves are incredibly sensitive to any disturbances and notoriously difficult to produce in a laboratory setting. I was able to produce these shock waves reliably and study how they reflected off flat obstacles. I developed a numerical method to predict the geometry of these reflections, detailed the conditions leading to transition between different reflection configurations, and documented a powerful shock wave focusing effect that could amplify pressures by a factor of 100 or more.