People

Faculty

Dr. Shyam Menon

Dr. Menon is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Louisiana State University. He received his B.E in Mechanical Engineering at VJTI, Mumbai, and M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park. He has since conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Southern California, and at Oregon State University. His research interests are primarily associated with multiphase flows with application to power generation and propulsion. He is the lead PI of the Energy and Propulsion Laboratory at LSU. (CV)

Graduate Students

Varun Viswamithra

Varun is a PhD student in the Mechanical and Industrial engineering department at Louisiana State University. He completed his Master of Science degree from University of Texas at Arlington with research in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). He has worked as an Application Engineer intern at Exa Corporation (Dassault Systems). His research focuses on use of  Ammonia as a carbon-free fuel with application to swirl combustors in gas turbine engines for stationary power generation.

James Leung

James is a graduate student pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Mechanical Engineering. James received his Master’s degree from Michigan State University. His research is focused on shock-induced aerobreakup of liquid droplets.

Mohana Gurunadhan

Mohana is a graduate student pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Mechanical Engineering. He received his Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from LSU and his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Anna University. His research is focused on simulations of melting and combustion in hybrid rocket engines.

Connor Becnel

Connor Becnel received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from LSU and is pursuing an MS degree through the Accelerated MS program. He is developing a tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy system to acquire temperature readings of high temperature sources. His research will focus on use of the TDLAS system to characterize combustion processes in hybrid rocket engines using a model combustor setup.

Ryan Meraux

Ryan Meraux received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and is pursuing an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering at LSU. His research involves the use of a multiphase hot cascade turbine blade test setup to investigate the impact of particulate laden flows on turbine blades and approaches to mitigate surface degradation caused by particle impact.

Undergraduate Researchers

Luke Russell

Ian Archangel

Previous Lab Members

Graduate Students

Hansen Jones (M.S, 2018)

Hansen earned his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from LSU and spent time working for Firefly Space Systems at their engineering offices outside Austin, TX before choosing to return to LSU to pursue his M.S. degree. Hansen’s research focused on water jet interactions with supersonic gas jets and characterization of resulting sprays using non-intrusive diagnostic techniques. Hansen is currently a liquid rocket propulsion test engineer at SpaceX.

Darren Dehesa (M.S, 2020)

Darren received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from LSU in addition to a minor in Aerospace Engineering. His research focused on development and use of simulation models for dynamic powertrain performance of small unmanned aircraft systems using MATLAB/Simulink. He is currently a Manufacturing Engineering with Boeing working at NASA Michoud.

Wanjun Dang (PhD, 2021)

Wanjun received her Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Wuhan University of Technology. She served for three years as an automobile engineer at Ford Motor Company. Her PhD research involved the use of droplet based techniques to measure fuel physical properties using micro-liter quantities with application to bio-fuel characterization for IC engines through the DOE Co-Optima project. Wanjun is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Colorado School of Mines.

Undergraduate Researchers

Eddie Veal (BS 2019, ME; Project Manager / Rotating Engineering Assurance Team Lead at Shell)

Vaibhav Rajora (BS 2019, Physics; PhD Student in Aerospace Engineering at Purdue)

Wei Zhao (BS 2019, ME; Maintenance engineer at Syngenta)

Sabrina Huezo (Physics)

James Szeszycki (BS 2019, ME; Specialist Sr., Planned Maintenance Systems at Carnival Cruise Line)

Laura Broadbridge (BS 2023, ME)

Dillon Ellender (BS 2020, ME; PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at UT-Austin)

Chris Jeansonne 

Joshua Vrettos (BS 2019, ME; Dredging Field Engineer at Weeks Marine, Inc)

Amer Algalban (BS 2023, ME)

Matthew Monju

Jasmine Li (Physics)

Caitlynn Sengchiam (ME)

Current Openings

For prospective graduate students who are interested in working in the Energy & Propulsion Lab, please refer to my research interests and publications to find out about the specific research topics and email me with a copy of your resume/CV. For current graduate students at LSU who are interested in working in the Energy & Propulsion Lab, please come talk to me directly in my office at 3290 A PFTH.