Dr Preethi Rajendram Soundararajan - University of Southampton

The challenge

Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, with UK domestic flights contributing 7% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, a figure projected to double by 2032 without intervention. While low-carbon fuels offer a pathway to net zero, they introduce instabilities that can potentially lead to engine failure. Existing passive control methods are unsuitable for these next-generation fuels and require costly redesigns.  

The research

Dr Preethi Rajendram Soundararajan’s research will address this challenge by investigating a novel active control method, supporting the development of cleaner, safer, and more efficient aircraft engines. 

The research explores an innovative plasma-based active-control approach to suppress combustion instabilities in future low-carbon aero-engines. Plasma, an electrically charged gas, can directly influence flame behaviour, offering a versatile alternative to conventional passive dampers. By combining experiments with theoretical modelling, the project will uncover the fundamental mechanisms of plasma-flame-acoustic interactions and identify how different low-carbon fuels trigger instabilities. This understanding will be used to develop a compact active-control demonstrator for next-generation fuel-flexible engines. 

The researcher

Dr Rajendram Soundararajan is a lecturer at the University of Southampton, where she researches low-carbon combustion technologies for next-generation engines. She has over a decade of international experience in combustion research with expertise spanning experimental methods, theoretical analysis, and numerical modelling. Her ambition is to develop affordable, fuel-flexible engines that ensure equitable access to air travel and energy while reducing dependence on geographically constrained fuel supplies, supporting cleaner, more efficient, and resilient energy and propulsion systems.