Associate Professor Sean O’Byrne has worked as an academic at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Canberra, Australia Since 2007. He graduated with a PhD degree in Physics from the Australian National University in 2002, and worked as an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow from 2002 to 2004 and as a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at UNSW Canberra from 2004 to 2006.
Associate Professor O’Byrne is an author of a total of 120 peer-reviewed publications. He has a h- index of 12 (Scopus). His publications include 1 book chapter and 41 Journal Papers, and a patent for a laser-based subsonic air speed sensor.
Associate Professor O’Byrne has led and worked as a member in several large research projects, including an international collaboration investigating separated flow in the transitional Kn regime, funded through grants from the US Air Force Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development and the Australian Research Council and has developed a scramjet inlet velocity and Mach number sensor that was flown as part of the Australian Space Research Program Scramspace flight test.
Research interests
- Transitional flows
- Development of laser-based flow diagnostics
- Micro-scale flows
- Measurement of transport coefficients at high Knudsen numbers Supersonic combustion flows
Research Student Supervision Record
- Primary supervisor for 6 graduated PhD students and 1 Masters student
- Co-Supervisor for 2 graduated PhD students
- Previously supervised 7 German/Austrian Masters-level students at UNSW@ADFA for Diplomarbeit research projects
Measures of Esteem
- Editor: shock waves journal
- International Advisory Committee Member: International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics Senior Member AIAA
- Member: Optical Society of America
- Keynote Lectures: 2015 Laser Ignition Conference, 2014 EUCASS Aerospace Thematic Workshop, Aussois, France
- Invited Speaker: 2018 AIAA Aviation Conference, 2014, 2015 OSA Light, Energy and the Environment Conference, 2012, 2018 Rarefied Gas Dynamics Symposium
- Invited Lecturer: 1st Brazilian school in hypersonic air-breathing propulsion
- Ran the 2012 Australian Conference on Laser Diagnostics in Fluid Mechanics and combustion.
Recent Awards
- 2015: Best Paper award for Laser Physics and Plasma Dynamics at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Aerospace for 2015 at Dallas/Ft Worth.