Dr. Alexei Poludnenko, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, along with a team of collaborators from the University of Colorado and Stanford University, received the 2017 Distinguished Paper Award in the Turbulent Flames colloquium from The Combustion Institute at the 36th International Symposium on Combustion.
The paper “The cross-scale physical-space transfer of kinetic energy in turbulent premixed flames,” was co-authored by Jeffrey O’Brien, Collin A.Z. Towery, Peter E. Hamlington, Matthias Ihme and Javier Urzay.
According to the announcement issued by the The Combustion Institute, the paper expands the fundamental understanding of how chemical energy is released by combustion chemical reactions and is then transferred into kinetic energy of a gaseous environment.
The results of the paper will be used to improve physical subgrid-scale models of turbulent transport and turbulent combustion in numerical simulations. The team hopes to use their research to advance the ability to control flame ignition and propagation in combustors for hypersonic aircrafts where flame stabilization is an issue.
The team began their research at Stanford University in 2014 during the Center for Turbulence Research Summer Program, and submitted their paper in 2016 for the 36th Symposium. Approximately 1,300 papers were submitted to the symposium categorized into 14 combustion science colloquia. One paper in each colloquium is selected as a Distinguished Paper. The 14 Distinguished Papers now have the chance of winning the Silver Combustion Medal to be awarded during the 37th Symposium in Dublin, Ireland.