In August 2018，Dr. Wenyu Sun (Adviser: Bin Yang) of our center received the Bernard Lewis scholarship from the Combustion Institute. The Bernard Lewis Scholarship is awarded at the biennial International Symposium on Combustion (no more than 6 awardees per session) to encourage young scientists and engineers to conduct high quality combustion studies. The winner must be a student or researcher who received PhD degree in the past three years, and his/her paper must be accepted for oral presentation at the symposium for the award year. She is the very first winner of this award from Tsinghua University since the founding of the scholarship in 1996.
Dr. Wenyu Sun (third from the right) receiving the award in Dublin, 2018.
Under the supervision of Professor Bin Yang, Dr. Sun was pursuing the intrinsic kinetic mechanisms for the combustion behaviors of oxygenated fuels, specifically, those recognized as novel and promising fuel additives or alternatives. To date, her main accomplishments were in three aspects: First, she studied the combustion kinetics of novel oxygenated fuels. The validated kinetic models, which exhibit satisfactory predictive performances, could contribute to thefuture numerical engine design. Second, she tried to reveal the underlying roles of oxygenated functionalities in the combustion characteristics. The understandings from the perspective of oxygenated functionalities are expected to benefit the fuel design. Last but not the least, she explored the addition effects of oxygenated fuels due to their significance towards the controllable engine operations and potential cross-linkages between the oxygenated additives and base hydrocarbons.
The above efforts led to 17 papers published in “Combustion and Flame” and “Proceedings of the Combustion Institute”, with 10 as the first author (or co-first author). At each of the successive 36thand 37thInternational Combustion Symposium, she had two first-author papers accepted for presentation.
Doctor Sun won the second prize of Excellent Tsinghua University PhD Thesis upon her PhD graduation. She has now joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France for postdoctoral research. The research direction is the reaction kinetics of PAH formation under shock tube pyrolysis conditions.
Edited by: Wei Zhang, Center for Combustion Energy, Mar. 3, 2019
