Dr. Kumaran Kannaiyan received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical engineering from Madurai Kamaraj University, India, with a Distinction honor. He received his Master’s and Doctoral degree in Mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. Later he joined Texas A&M University’s branch campus in Qatar as a Postdoctoral research associate and then promoted to Assistant research scientist. In parallel, he also held a visiting lecturer position at Texas A&M University at Qatar.

He has more than ten years of research experience broadly in the area of thermo-fluidics with an emphasis on the utilization of ‘sustainable’ alternative energy sources and mitigation of environmental impact. His specific research interests include, but not limited to,

• non-reacting spray and combustion studies of alternative fuels for different modes of transport,
• high-speed (supersonic) reacting flow studies,
• Thermal-hydraulics of alternative (novel) working fluids for refrigeration and power applications,
• role of nanoscale additives in fuel performance.

Over these years, he had several opportunities to collaborate with industrial partners like Rolls-Royce, Shell, District Cooling companies. In visiting lecturer role, he has more than two years of teaching experience and taught undergraduate courses like Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer.

He has vast experience in building state-of-the-art infrastructure for his research and in employing non-intrusive diagnostic and computational tools. He has successfully secured external research grants to the tune of about a million US$ and a few accolades. He has published more than 50 technical papers in reputed journals and peer-reviewed international conferences with an h-index of 12 and counting!

• Alternative fuels;
• Alternative refrigerants;
• Multiphase Thermo-fluid characteristics;
• Spray and Combustion diagnostics;
• Nanoscale additives;
• Computational Fluid Dynamics: Supersonic/Hypersonic mixing and combustion studies