LSU ME Assistant Professor Receives AFOSR Young Investigator Award

LSU Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Ope Owoyele has received a Young Investigator Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The Young Investigator Program supports early-career scientists and engineers who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. Owoyele’s award will provide $450,000 over three years to support research at the intersection of combustion science, physics-informed machine learning, and computational modeling.

Owoyele’s project addresses a major challenge in turbulent combustion: accurately simulating the interaction between turbulence and chemical reactions without the prohibitive cost of conventional high-fidelity models. His research will develop advanced, physics-informed machine learning methods that identify compact and interpretable structure in combustion data, allowing these systems to be modeled more efficiently while preserving key physical constraints. The goal is to create faster, more reliable computational tools for analyzing turbulent reacting flows relevant to aerospace and propulsion applications.

“I’m grateful for AFOSR’s support,” Owoyele said. “This project will develop advanced machine learning tools that make complex combustion simulations faster, more interpretable, and better grounded in fundamental physical laws. The broader goal is to improve our ability to study challenging combustion regimes relevant to the Air Force, including high-speed reacting flows, while reducing computational cost and helping accelerate the design process.”

The project will produce computational methods that drastically reduce the cost of high-fidelity combustion simulations while maintaining predictive fidelity. These advances will support more efficient analysis of high-speed combustion environments and inform the design of next-generation combustors and advanced propulsion technologies.