Professor Menon joined Flow Industries, Kent, Washington, as a research scientist, and in 1988, became a senior scientist and program manager for the computational fluid dynamics group in Quest Integrated, Inc. (formerly called Flow Research, Inc.). At Quest, Menon led research teams in various research projects such as the active control of combustion instability in ramjet engines, supersonic mixing studies, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft fluid dynamics, and hypersonic reentry problems. In 1992, he joined Georgia Institute of Technology as an associate professor and became a professor in 1997. He is currently the Hightower Professor of Engineering in Georgia Tech. Professor Menon is a world renowned expert in large-eddy simulation of turbulent reacting and non-reacting flows and has developed unique simulation capabilities to study pollutant formation, ozone depletion in high-altitude aircraft jet plumes and combustion in gas turbine and ramjet engines. He has been (and is currently) a principal investigator for a wide range of research projects funded by NASA, Department of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, Defense Threat Reduction Agency. His work has been (and is also) supported by many industries including General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Solar Turbines, Boeing, Safran (France), Hyundai (S. Korea), JAXA (Japan), IHI (Japan) and Rocketdyne-Aerojet. He has published and/or presented over 395 papers. Professor Menon is a Fellow of AAAS, Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a member of the American Physical Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Combustion Institute and the Sigma Xi. He is a peer reviewer for numerous archival journals, NASA, NSF, DoD and DOE research proposals.

Research Interests

Experimental and computational fluid mechanics, including:

• Direct and large-eddy simulations (LES) of turbulent combustion
• Subgrid modeling for two-phase turbulent reacting flows
• Two-level simulations and wake studies in highly turbulent flows
• LES and reduced basis modeling of combustion instability in liquid-fueled rocket engines
• Shock-to-detonation transition (DDT) in condensed phase energetic materials
• Multi-phase blast modeling with reactive metal particles
• Agent defeat simulations of dense clouds of nano particles or aerosols
• Experimental and computational studies of supersonic combustion

Selected Publications

• * Sankaran, V. and Menon, S., “LES of Spray Combustion in Swirling Flows,” J. of Turbulence, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002.
• Kemenov, K. and Menon, S., “Explicit Small-Scale Velocity Simulation for High Reynolds Number Turbulent Flows,” J. Comp. Phys., Vol. 220, No. 1, pp. 290-311, 2006.
• Patel, N. and Menon, S., “Simulation of Spray-Turbulence-Flame Interactions in a Lean Direct Injection Combustor,” Combustion and Flame, Vol. 153, pp. 228-257, 2008.
• Sen, B. and Menon, S., “Turbulent Premixed Flame Modeling Using Artificial Neural Networks Based Chemical Kinetics,” Proc. Comb. Inst., Vol. 32, pp. 1605-1611, 2009.
• Ukai, S., Balakrishnan, K., and Menon, S., “On Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability in Dilute Gas-Particle Mixtures,” Physics of Fluids, Vol. 22,104103, 2010.
• Gryngartern, L and Menon, S., “A Generalized Approach for Sub- and Super-Critical Flows using the Local Discontinuous Galerkin Method,” Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 253, pp. 169-185, 2013.
• Ranjan R. and Menon, S., “On the Application of the Two-level Large-eddy Simulation Method to Turbulent Free-shear and Wake Flows”, J. Turb., Vol. 16, pp. 136-166, 2015.
• Akiki, M. and Menon, S., “A Model for Hot Spot Formation in Shocked Energetic Materials,” Combustion and Flame, Vol. 162, pp. 1759-1773, 2015.
• Gottiparthi, K. C., Schulz, J. C., and Menon, S., “Uncertainty Quantification of Bacterial Aerosol Neutralization in Shock Heated Gases,” Shock Waves, Vol. 25, pp. 77-90, 2015.
• Srinivasan, S., Ranjan, R. and Menon, S., “Flame Dynamics During Combustion Instability in a High-Pressure, Shear-Coaxial Injector Combustor,” Flow, Turbulence & Comb., Vol. 94, pp. 237-264, 2015.