Title: Advances and Challenges in Laminar Flame Experiments and Implications for Combustion Chemistry
Speaker: Prof. Fokion N. Egolfopoulos
From: University of Southern California, USA
Date: Nov. 27, 2014
CV of the Speaker:
Fokion N. Egolfopoulos received a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in February 1981 and a M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from San Jose State University in December 1984. Subsequently, he received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California at Davis in June 1990, after having spent the last two years of his doctoral research at Princeton University. After his formal education he has been associated with the Combustion and Fuels Laboratory at Princeton University as a Research Associate from June 1990 to August 1991. In August 1991 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California at the rank of Assistant Professor. In April 1997 he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor and from January 1998 until November of 2001 he was appointed also as Visiting Associate and Lecturer of the Department of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. In June of 2002 we was promoted to the rank of Full Professor. In April 2013 he was appointed to the William E. Leonhard Professorship in Engineering.
Professor Egolfopoulos' current research interests include: aerodynamic and kinetic processes in flames, propulsion, alternative fuels including biofuels, practical fuels used in transportation and air-breathing propulsion, pollutant formation, particle-laden reacting flows, detailed modeling of reacting flows, and laser diagnostics. He has authored and co-authored one hundred sixteen (116) archival journal publications, two (2) book chapters, one hundred and fifty one (151) conference proceedings and reports, and has given one hundred thirty five (135) scholarly presentations.
He was a recipient of the Silver Medal of the Combustion Institute at the Twenty-Second International Combustion Symposium. In 2009, he was elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). In 2010, he was elected Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He is currently the Editor in Chief of Combustion and Flame, the leading combustion journal, after having served as an Associate Editor of the journal from January 2003 until December 2008. On July 2014, he was elected a member of the Board of Directors of the Combustion Institute.
Abstract:
Laminar flames constitute an essential part of kinetic model development as the rates of elementary reactions are studied and/or validated in the presence of temperature and species concentration gradients. The focus of this presentation will be on recent findings regarding the physics of low- pressure, burner-stabilized flat premixed flames for chemical speciation studies, as well as the stagnation and spherically expanding flames for determining the global flame properties. The data derived using these methods are considered to be reliable for three decades of pressures ranging from about 50 mbar to over 50 bar. Furthermore, the attendant initial and/or boundary conditions and physics are in principle well characterized, allowing for the isolation of various physical parameters that could affect the flame structure and thus the reported data. The merits of each approach and the advances that have been made will be outlined and the uncertainties of the reported data will be discussed. At the same time, the potential sources of uncertainties associated with experimental methods and hypotheses for data extraction of each method will be emphasized. These uncertainties include unquantified physical effects, inherent instrument limitations, data processing, and data interpretation. Recommendations to reduce experimental uncertainties and increase data fidelity, essential for accurate kinetic model development will be given.
