High-Pressure Combustion - The most engaging manner of
improving the energy/pollution situation is simple conservation, and
one of the biggest opportunities for conservation is the development of
more efficient combustion engines. From basic thermodynamics, we have
learned that thermal cycles, such as the Otto and Diesel, increase in
efficiency with increasing compression ratio. However, combustion
processes, such as knocking or reaction-limiting chemistry, that can
occur at high pressures, hinder our achievement of these high thermal
efficiencies. In fact, there exists virtually no detailed experimental
investigation of fundamental combustion at high pressures, not at the 60
atmospheres in your diesel engine, not even at the 10 atmospheres in
your spark engine! This dearth of experimental data is perhaps due to
difficulties and safety issues (detonations) involved with the study of
reactive mixtures at high initial pressures. Recently, our lab group
has built a combustion chamber of novel design to safely study
high-pressure phenomena. All experiments performed in this study will
be pioneering, with hopefully new theory to be formulated.
Going with the Flow - How do I measure complex flows
that are unsteady in nature, e.g. oscillating and turbulent ones? Modern
diagnostics measure them by seeding them with small particles, with the
assumption that they go with the flow. But how can I be sure that
these particles are blindly devoted to the flow? Because if not, a lot
of people aren't measuring the right thing and their explanation of
their data may be a lot of baloney. Let's make some calculations.
Power Cycles with Chemically and Physically Reacting
Fluids - The general topic of power cycles has been studied to
death. However, power cycles with fluids undergoing physical and/or
chemical reactions hold the possibility of greater efficiency, or might
also be employed to develop a power cycle with practical features, such
as low cost or cheap, low-quality energy sources. If nothing else, use
of chemical and physical reactions would give the designer many more
variables to work with to optimize the production of power for a given
set of constraints. Some work has been done on cycles where gaseous fluids
dissociate to produce more power output while going through the
expansion stage, but the topic is largely untouched. The project would
start with a review of why present cycles work well or poorly; then
practical ways of improving such cycles using fluids undergoing
reactions would be studied and optimized. Who knows? Maybe a patent
could be in the making.
Cleaning Up Oil Spills -
The cost of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of a few years ago is estimated to
be over one billion
dollars, not to mention environmental damage and loss of public good
will. As the populace grows more environmentally conscious, no good
way seems to exist to clean up large oil spills. One way is of course
to burn it, but doing so may engender even more deleterious results,
such as pollution from soot and other contaminants. However, maybe we
can find a creative way do it, minimizing pollution. Coupling
combustion ideas with "crazy" ideas such as taking advantage of surface
tension effects, earth-rotation Coriolis effects, or screens propelled
by ocean waves or the wind, we might find a practical solution. The
project would begin, of course, with reviewing what has been done
already. New ideas would be developed and studied, with the most
promising ones singled out and optimized. I definitely see a patent
idea in the making.
Incineration of Hazardous Wastes - Due to
obvious environmental considerations, several pieces of legislation
have been passed strictly regulating the production, use, and disposal
of hazardous wastes. With the advent of Superfund in 1980, people
using these hazardous materials have been looking at methods of
permanent disposal, such as incineration versus landfilling. However,
many of these wastes contain chlorine, introducing other problems, such
as decreased burning temperatures and production of environmental
detrimental compounds, eg. soot, phosgene, and free chlorine. Our
group has been collecting fundamental data on the simplest chlorinated
hydrocarbons, but work on more application-oriented settings is
lacking. The project would involve research into improving incinerator
operation and design using insights that we have gained from
fundamental investigations. If a better solution cannot be
immediately invented, such a study would at least help to increase a
general understanding of the problem at hand, and possibly even refocus
our research to study more relevant phenomena.
Natural Gas as a Chemical Feedstock - Natural gas,
which is composed primarily of methane, is typically used as a heating
fuel. However, dwindling reserves of other fossil fuels has prompted
studies into the conversion of natural gas into heavier hydrodcarbons,
instead of obtaining these substances from petroleum distillation. This
technology was not developed into a feasible process until recently,
when advances in the high-temperature kinetics of hydrocarbons and their
interaction with chlorine were better understood. Now that we have a
better handle on the basic science of the problem, we can move forward
and try to model a process whereby natural gas and chlorine are heated
in the presence of oxygen and are allowed to react and form these
larger fuels.
Combustion Phenomena in Supernovae - Supernovae are
spectacular events. The light emission during the disappearance of
supernovae is more than 100 times of that of our Sun! By what
mechanism(s) do supernovae explode? In fact, believe it or not, the
knocking that sometimes occurs in your car engine might be similar to
what happens in supernovae! By applying a physical analysis of the
possible combustion phenomena - deflagration (flame that propagates
subsonically) or detonation (combustion that propagates supersonically)
- in supernovae, we might better understand the mechanism(s) causing
the disappearance.
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