Rate My Professor Xiaoxiao Sun

Dr Xiaoxiao Sun is a lecturer in Low Emissions Gas Turbine Combustion at Cranfield University, where she is affiliated with the Centre for Aeronautics, Propulsion and Power. She completed her PhD in 2018, which focused on the preliminary design of an aero engine low emissions combustor using a multi-fidelity modelling approach with analyses of fuel injection, heat transfer, emissions and other combustor performance characteristics.

Her research specializations include low emissions gas turbine combustion, hydrogen micromix combustion technology, dual fuel combustors, novel hydrogen combustors and liquid fuel spray characteristics. Dr Sun has led numerical and experimental research on hydrogen micromix combustion within the EU H2020 ENABLEH2 project and serves as workpackage lead for the CleanSky 2 UTOPEA project assessing dual fuel and hydrogen combustors. She also collaborates with Siemens Energy on numerical modelling and experimental validation of liquid fuel spray characteristics. Key publications include a 2025 review of hydrogen micromix combustion technologies in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, a 2024 validation study of a hybrid VOF-Lagrangian numerical methodology in the Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power, and a 2020 paper on the development of a preliminary design methodology for modern low emissions aero combustors in the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part A: Journal of Power and Energy. Additional works from 2017 to 2025 cover topics such as hydrogen propulsion for aviation, methanol as an alternative fuel and numerical investigations of liquid jets in crossflow.