Final-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford, working with Rolls-Royce to make liquid hydrogen jet engines thermally viable. My research combines hands-on aerothermal engineering with applied machine learning, spanning wind tunnel testing, CFD validation, and surrogate-model-driven design optimisation.
A six-stage research programme sponsored by Rolls-Royce (industrial supervisor: Prof. Marko Bacic) and supervised by Prof. John Coull & Prof. Peter Ireland — click any stage to explore it in full.
Define the thermal architecture, then size heat exchangers from a thermodynamic cycle model across the flight envelope.
Major modifications to an annular wind tunnel, enabling experimental testing under representative outlet-guide-vane installation flow.
Experimentally test the heat exchanger geometry under uniform and distorted (post-OGV) inlet conditions.
Validate a numerical CFD model against the experimental dataset, enabling design exploration beyond physical testing.
Gaussian Process surrogates from an adaptive DoE campaign; Bayesian Optimisation and NSGA-II searches cut evaluation time to milliseconds.
Represent the optimised designs at full engine level to quantify the resulting efficiency improvement.