👋 Hello world

My resolution for 2026 was to finally start a blog, so here is my attempt to make that happen.

My name is Bulut Tekgül, and I currently work as a Combustion & CFD Expert at Wärtsilä Finland, a leading company in the marine and energy sectors. My day-to-day work revolves around understanding, modeling, and improving complex combustion systems, often under very real industrial constraints.

I hold a PhD from Aalto University, where my academic background was firmly rooted in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and combustion modeling. My doctoral research focused on high-fidelity simulations of reactive flows, with particular emphasis on internal combustion engines, spray combustion, and detailed chemical kinetics. During this time, I spent a lot of effort developing, configuring, and validating CFD workflows in OpenFOAM, working with moving meshes, multiphase flows, and reactive simulations.

After my PhD, I continued in academia as a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. There, I worked in a high-performance computing environment on advanced combustion and CFD problems, further deepening my experience with large-scale simulations, model validation, and the gap between fundamental research and practical engineering applications.

Before my current role, I worked across both academic and applied research environments, contributing to engine-related CFD projects that combined numerical methods, physical modeling, and experimental comparison. Over time, my work has increasingly lived at the intersection of theory, simulation, and engineering reality — where models have to be accurate, robust, and usable.

Why this blog?

The idea behind this blog is simple:

• to share insights from my work in combustion and CFD
• to write practical posts about OpenFOAM, including workflows, pitfalls, and useful hacks
• to document things I wish I had written down years ago
• and occasionally to reflect on engineering, research, and careers in technical fields

This won’t be a textbook, and it won’t be marketing suggesting that everything works perfectly. It’s more of a working engineer’s notebook, cleaned up enough to be useful to others.

If you’re working with OpenFOAM, engine simulations, combustion modeling, or just enjoy thinking about how complex simulations meet real-world constraints, you’ll probably find something familiar here.

Thanks for reading and welcome!