• News item 31

Post Doc is now post doc!

11 April 2008
News picture

Picture of Neal Morgan cutting a cake to celebrate passing his PhD viva

CoMo Group member Neal Morgan passed his PhD viva last week with his thesis entitled "Numerical Modelling of the Growth of Nanoparticles". This work was a world away from what Neal has been doing for the last 18 months in his role as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Shell's Technology Centre near Chester under the E.U. FP6 "Transfer of Knowledge" (ToK) scheme...

Neal started his fellowship at the end of September 2006 on a project entitled "Optimisation of Fuels for Future Engine Technologies via Mixture Inhomogeneity Modelling". The original focus of the project was to use a newly developed kinetic mechanism for gasoline surrogate fuels in conjunction with the CoMo Group's SRM code to further our understanding of the ways in which HCCI technology reacts to the subtleties of how real fuels burn.

As is often the case with these projects, in the last 18 months the project has developed into much more. The original focus is still in place with a new skeletal mechanism now being used, developed by Neal using a Directed Relational Graph (DRG) method which halves the size of the original mechanism. He has also branched out into other areas within the remit of the project though; looking at Quantitative Structural Activity Relationships (QSAR) techniques to search for novel components for gasoline, and performing some experimental work — a first for the CoMo Group — on a constant-volume spray bomb which mimics diesel engines.

At the end of September 2008 Neal will return to Cambridge for his final year to continue with some of his earlier projects and help the CoMo Group with some new ones.