Chemical Reaction Neural Network

Abstract:

The combustion science is at the intersection of chemical kinetics and fluid dynamics, making this discipline physically rich and intellectually challenging. Applying tools developed in other disciplines to combustion research could provide us new perspectives and enable new discoveries. In the last decades, deep learning has achieved enormous progress in various tasks in computer science, including computer vision and natural language processing. We want to explore the potential of deep learning in learning the interactions among high-dimensional species during chemical energy conversion, especially the combustion process. Trained in fundamental combustion, specifically, in laminar flame chemistry and dynamics, I will share our recent work on combining combustion with machine learning. I will demonstrate our recently developed Chemical Reaction Neural Network approach to identify reaction pathways and simultaneously quantify kinetic parameters from data without any prior knowledge of the chemical system. Specifically, I will discuss the challenges in developing such an approach, successful case studies in energy conversion and biochemistry, and future opportunities.

 

Biography:

Dr. Sili Deng received her bachelor’s degree in Thermal Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2010 and her master’s and doctoral degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2012 and 2016, respectively. From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Deng was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT as an assistant professor and was appointed to the d'Arbeloff Career Development Chair in January 2019. Her research focuses on energy conversion and materials synthesis. Specifically, Dr. Deng is interested in the fundamental understanding of combustion and emissions, physics-informed data-driven modeling of reacting flows, carbon-neutral energetic materials, and flame synthesis of materials. Dr. Deng received the Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Institute in 2016.