Michael Mueller
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. My research interests are in high-fidelity simulations and modeling of turbulent combustion. Turbulent combustion is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in engineered systems such as automotive engines, aircraft engines, and stationary gas turbines (my overarching applications) and natural phenomena such as wildfires. Despite its importance, we actually do not understand turbulent combustion very well, and, as a result, the design of these very important devices is largely empirical. Empirical design relies extensively on prototype testing, which is expensive and slow, and limits how quickly improvements can be made in efficiency, performance, and cost. My research seeks to use simulations to understand and model turbulent combustion phenomena. My work relies extensively on high-performance, parallel computing ranging from multi-core workstations to modest clusters of a thousand processors that we host on campus to the largest computers in the world with one hundred thousand processors that are located at national labs. My current interests include modeling emissions (soot, NOx, etc.), liquid sprays, next-generation combustion concepts, and the coupling between acoustics and combustion, which is the mechanism by which rocket and stationary gas turbine combustors become unstable.
Originally from the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast, I received my BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007. I then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and received my MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2009 and 2012, respectively. I then started as an assistant professor at Princeton this Fall.