Dr Konstantina Vogiatzaki - safeguarding our energy future

Dr Konstantina Vogiatzaki's research seeks to unlock the physics and push the manifold operating limits of our modern energy systems in order to increase their efficiency, regulate their fuel consumption and minimise their harmful emissions.

Due to the escalating world population growth, global demand for energy is rising which is an increasingly pressing issue, particularly for the 1.3 billion people who already don't have access to fundamental energy resources, such as fuel or electricity. What is more, our natural resources are being depleted while the production and consumption of energy is severely damaging our ecosystems.

Energy sustainability means, primarily, environmental sustainability, something closely linked to an urgent need for 'ultra high efficient - ultra low emission' energy systems. It also means energy available for everyone, not only for wealthy, developed countries and overgrown mega-cities.

To address these issues, we need flexible energy systems that can operate with various fuel inputs. This way we can decentralise our energy production sites and lower production costs. Konstantina is committed to respond to these challenges. She has not only devoted her academic research to this cause, but she has also worked in close collaboration with industries in order to help them develop environmentally responsible and sustainable energy systems.

Dr Konstantina Vogiatzaki

Early on, as a student at the Applied Mathematics Department of the Technical University of Athens, Dr Konstantina Vogiatzaki developed a curiosity in phenomena governed by randomness, such as turbulence, which is a flow regime commonly observed in fuel combustion processes. Her early research focused on the effort to model such phenomena through probabilistic and uncertainty theories. She then took this interest to the next level during her doctoral studies at the Imperial College of London where she discovered the beauty of combining the randomness of turbulence phenomena with input from chemical reactions common in energy production.

Almost 10 years later, her belief that mathematics have a big, unacknowledged role to play in the future of energy science remains strong and drives her pioneering research in energy systems. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Brighton, Konstantina combines the computational power of supercomputers and the predictive abilities of Computational Fluid Dynamics in order to create novel tools that will be available to both academic and industrial sectors and will facilitate the virtual design of future engines.

Inspiring others

Konstantina’s research appears in several top fully-refereed international journals and she is an elected member of the Combustion Physics Group of the Institute of Physics. Before coming to Brighton, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College for two years, developing probabilistic LES models for sprays in gas turbines using stochastic fields approach, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA where she was appointed as Research Fellow at the Mechanical Engineering Department. There, she led the Computational Fluid Dynamics team of the MIT's Reacting Gas Dynamics Laboratory for two years.

She is the winner of the 2010 Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Symposium and the 2016 Hinzelwood Prize, which recognises meritorious work by a young member of the British Section of the Combustion Institute.