Yale Engineering-Center for Combustion Studies

Faculty of
Engineering
Yale University
Dunham Lab 222
10 Hillhouse Avenue P.O. Box 208267
New Haven, CT
06512

The Yale Center for Combustion Studies, an interdisciplinary research center, uses experimental, computational, and mathematical techniques to deal with the fundamentals of chemically reacting and multiphase combustion systems. Research support comes from government sources, such as AFOSR, NSF, DOE, ARO, and ONR, and from industrial sponsors such as the United Technologies Research Center and SCM.

Research Areas

Convective Energy and Mass Transfer
Catalytically Stabilized Combustion
Deposition of Vapors and Particles from Combustion Products
Energetic Materials
Gas and Particle Sampling
Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Kinetics
Laser Diagnostics for Temperature, Species, Droplet, and Velocity Distributions in Flames
Microscale Combustion
Numerical Simulation of Combustion Dynamics
Organic and Inorganic 'Soot' Formation, Coagulation and Transport
Spray Combustion
Turbulent Flames

Research Facilities
Center laboratories occupy 9,000 sq. ft. in the Departments of Applied Physics, Chemical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. Research equipment includes state-of-the-art instrumentation for planar laser-induced fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, absorption and emission spectroscopy, nonlinear optical spectroscopy, photo ionization spectroscopy, Fourier transform spectroscopy, laser Doppler anemometry, phase Doppler anemometry, elastic and inelastic light scattering, gas chromatography, and mass spectrometry. The labs are also equipped with an assortment of laminar and turbulent burners.

Computational facilities include an 8-cpu AMD Opteron cluster equipped with 32GB of RAM, a 24-cpu Intel Xeon cluster with 24GB of RAM, two four-way IBM 44P-270 systems, and a variety of PC-based multiprocessor workstations running Linux. All computational systems are connected to a high-speed 1.2 TB RAID array via gigabit Ethernet links.

The laboratory also has access to larger-scale parallel systems through Yale's High-Performance Computing Group, including a 160-cpu Xeon cluster with gigabit links and a 132-cpu Opteron cluster connected via a dedicated Myrinet network for message-passing. All systems run the latest development tools and come with vendor-tuned libraries for maximum performance. In addition, there is an extensive collection of smaller workstations.

Research Faculty

Alessandro Gomez, Mechanical Engineering
Marshall B. Long, Mechanical Engineering
Lisa D. Pfefferle, Chemical Engineering
Daniel E. Rosner, Chemical Engineering
Mitchell D. Smooke, Mechanical Engineering

Associated and Adjunct Faculty

Richard K. Chang, Applied Physics
Juan Fernández de la Mora, Mechanical Engineering
Gary L. Haller, Chemical Engineering
Amable Liñan, Adjunct
Forman A. Williams, Adjunct

Educational Activities
Center faculty offer graduate level courses in combustion and also short courses. Combustion is also a significant component of courses on chemical kinetics, chemical reactor design, environmental engineering, transport phenomena, propulsion and energy conversion, air pollution, and thermodynamics. Seminars and research group meetings are held weekly or biweekly.

For more information about the Center, please contact:

Dr. Alessandro Gomez, Director
Center for Combustion Studies
Yale University
P.O. Box 208286
New Haven, CT 06520-8286 USA
E-mail: alessandro.gomez@yale.edu
Phone: 1 (203) 432-4384
Fax: 1 (203) 432-7654

For information about graduate studies in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale University, see our general graduate studies site.

For information about the Yale Department of Applied Physics, the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Department of Electrical Engineering, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Programs in Biomedical Engineering and Environmental Engineering, please visit Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science site.