PTG research on SAF presented at the 3rd CYPHER COST Action General Meeting

PTG member Giuseppe Indelicato has participated in the 3rd General Meeting of the CYPHER COST Action in Istanbul, where he presented ongoing work at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center on alternative aviation fuels, commonly referred to as Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF).

Although synthetic aviation fuels have been studied since the middle ’50s, interest in SAF has grown significantly in recent years due to new policies and mandates aimed at reducing aviation emissions. However, important questions remain regarding their combustion behavior and emissions performance, including their impact on NOx, soot formation, laminar flame speed, and ignition delay time. These uncertainties are partly linked to the limited availability and high cost of SAF samples, which restrict large and systematic experimental campaigns.

The work conducted within the PTG explores how High Performance Computing, big data analysis, and fuel surrogate modelling can support SAF research. By generating and simulating synthetic populations of fuel surrogates around reference samples, this approach can help build databases for emissions and combustion analysis, support Machine Learning models, and contribute to future tools for fuel screening and combustion target evaluation.