ME Ph.D. students won combustion art competition

April 5, 2019

Saeid Zare and Shrabanti Roy, Ph.D. candidates in the Mechanical Engineering Department, won the Award for Technical Merit at the 2019 US National Combustion Meeting, Pasadena, CA. They were recognized during the banquet held on March 26. Past winners of the Combustion Art Competition can be found here.

The submission – FLAME GARDEN – was inspired by stabilized diffusion flames using repetitive nanosecond pulsed (RNP) plasma discharge. While people are used to traditional comparison among flame structures, the flame can be seen and compared from different points of view. The flame photos, under different RNP frequency, have been rotated around the burner nozzle and shaped beautiful flower-like images.

Saeid and Shrabanti are currently working under the supervision of Dr. Omid Askari in the Plasma and Combustion Research Laboratory (PCRL) on combustion characteristics measurement of novel oxygenated biofuels, plasma-assisted combustion, chemical mechanism development as well as the flame kernel modeling at engine-relevant conditions.

The US National Combustion Meeting is the premier combustion science meeting in the US and has been organized biennially since 1999 by the joint US Sections of The Combustion Institute (the Western States Section or WSSCI, the Eastern States Section orESSCI, and the Central States Section or CSSCI).

This is the second time that PCRL has won a Combustion Art Award.