High Speed Propulsion Lab in IIT Kharagpur, India
The APSYS lab is located at 001 ground floor of Annex Building in the Aerospace Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur, India. Research on high speed propulsion, pulse jet ignition, vortex combustion, thermoacoustics, spark ignition, jet deflection, etc is being conducted experimentally and computationally. The group performs flow imaging, flow diagnostics, pressure measurements on scaled down test objects. Members have access to a super-computing facility for running computer codes like Fluent, SU2, OpenFoam etc. The Lab has a dedicated compressed air facility, a direct connect modular flow facility capable of running various aerothermodynamic studies. A team of PhD students, MTech students and Undergrad students work on various projects.
APSYS Labs receives DST funding for turbulent combustion research. The funding will cover equipment procurement for pressure measurements and the purchase of specialty gases used in the tests.

Areas of research include combustion oscillations, vortex driven flows, pulsating flows, method of characteristics, combustion sciences etc.As part of our work in high speed combustors, we are studying flame behavior, ignition, stabilization, flashback and mode transition in high speed combustors both with cavity assisted and strut assisted flame stabilization mechanisms. As part of our work on Combustion Instability prediction and control, we are also looking at vortex driven resonant combustion in Gas Turbine combustors. Active combustion control using secondary injection targeting q' oscillation tailoring are being attempted.
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The rig is being instrumentated for transitioning from cold flow supersonic mixing studies to reacting flow mode transition studies.
... | 1. Minwook Chan PhD Thesis | |
| 2. PhD Thesis |
Aerodynamics, Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer and Combustion Chemistry. The building blocks of propusion systems. While feedback control is also an integral part, courses like these primarily cover the mechanical aspects of propulsion systems.
... Multistep CFD simulations on HPC cluster using Fluent showing Heat Release Distribution
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Understanding upstream flame propagation in scramjets is challenging, particularly concerning flame flashback in a combustor with a novel strut-cavity flame holder. Two-dimensional unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) simulations were performed to investigate how Mach number and wall divergence affect flame behavior. The utility of the strut-cavity flame holder was highlighted through a study of its non-reacting flow characteristics. Flow dynamics are significantly altered as the shear layer above the cavity interacts with the downstream hydrogen jet. Shear layer dynamics and fuel-air mixing are improved through key factors such as shock-train behavior, cavity oscillations, and transverse fuel injection. The submerged fuel jet is less exposed to supersonic flow and demonstrates reduced entropy rise, achieving a 16% increase in mixing efficiency compared to standalone struts and a 46% improvement over transverse injection without a flame holder. Thermal choking shifts the shock train upstream, facilitating interactions with the shear layer and enhancing vortex formation, which decreases flow speed and promotes upstream flame propagation. The presence of OH radicals indicates that flame flashback follows a periodic pattern with an initial gradual slope, suggesting effective anchoring. Stability and flashback likelihood are affected by low-speed zones, vortex merging, and wall divergence. At Mach 3, combustion efficiency improves without wall divergence due to...
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BTP and MTP Project Topics - 2023 Batch
Amardip Ghosh #Advanced Propulsion Systems (APSYS) Lab
This year we have a large number of BTP and MTP students as well as students from outside schools interning with our lab. While we remain open to project suggestions from students and sponsors, we also want to create a thematic focus of projects we want students to work on. If you have signed up with our lab for your BTP, MTP or Summer Internship, you can go over the list of topics we are proposing. Also read up the literature in the attachments section. You may be able to extend the work des... 
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