Rowena Ball
ARC
Future Fellow
Email Rowena.Ball@anu.edu.au
Phone +61(0)2 61250727 office, +61(0)4 8893 8138 mobile
Current research
If you are interested in a PhD project on the role of fire in global carbon cycle regulation or new technologies for CO2 separation, and if you have an Hons I degree in applied maths, physical chemistry, chemical engineering or equivalent, you are welcome to contact me or drop in to JD #27 room 1192 for a chat.
Project I: New Endex technologies for carbon management.
The next 50 years will be
the era during which the world's fuels and emissions must be
decarbonised. Endex thermoreactive principles [1] underpin new
high efficiency systems for separating carbon from fuels and flue
gases. In collaboration with Imperial College London, the
University of Leeds, CanMet Energy, and an industry partner, I am
developing a suite of Endex carbon capture technologies.
[1]
BF Gray and R Ball. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 455, 163 (1999) and R
Ball and BF Gray. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 455, 4223 (1999).
Project II: The CharXive Archives and the role of fire in global carbon cycles.
Endex principles also underpin carbon capture from the atmosphere and have been used by nature for millions of years: the mechanism behind thermal decomposition of biomass is an Endex thermochemical oscillator that governs the distribution of carbon between the global solid black carbon reservoir and the atmospheric CO2 reservoir. This research aims to elucidate this mechanism.
Project III: Non-classical thermal ignition.
A grave threat to security is the use of liquid peroxide bombs by terrorists, and it seems grimly inevitable that their use as mass murder weapons will increase. My research on Endex systems has led to the finding that oscillatory thermal instability is the initiator of thermal runaway in liquid peroxides and also was the primary cause of the Bhopal disaster.
Research Keywords
Applied mathematics, Nonlinear and complex dynamical systems, Stability and chaos theory, Physical chemistry, Self-organizing processes and emergent structure, Endex thermoreactive systems, Carbon capture, Carbon sequestration, Global carbon cycles, Thermochemical instabilities, Combustion theory and modelling, Quasi two-dimensional flows, Country pub lunches.
Links
Mathematical Sciences Institute, ANU
Royal Commission into the Stolen Careers
A few publications
Ball, R and Sceats MG (2010). Separation of
carbon dioxide from flue emissions using Endex principles. Fuel
89, 2750
Rowena Ball (2008).
Combustion of Biomass as a Global Carbon Sink. The Open
Thermodynamics Journal 2, 106-108. doi:
10.2174/1874396X00802010106
Rowena Ball and Philip Holmes (2007). Dynamical
systems, stability, and chaos. Chapter 1 in: JP Denier and JS
Frederiksen (editors),
Frontiers in Turbulence and Coherent Structures. World
Scientific Lecture Notes in Complex Systems Vol.
6, pp. 1-27.
Ball, R
(2009). High confinement at low power
input: Analysis of tradeoffs between turbulence suppression,
edge fluctuations, and resilience using stability theory.
Proceedings of the 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control,
2009, pages 297-302, doi 10.1109/CDC.2009.5399587.