Combustion Research Facility

Advancing fundamental physical sciences and technologies for America’s energy future

Established as the first U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facility in the 1970s and designated a DOE collaborative research facility in 2008, the Combustion Research Facility (CRF) at Sandia National Laboratories has served as a national and international leader in combustion science and technology for more than 40 years. The CRF’s inherent strengths are now being applied to address ever broader scientific and technical challenges for energy use in a changing world.

Collaborative mission

At the CRF, we encourage the direct involvement of individual collaborators from the scientific community. We host more than 150 collaborators each year who work side-by-side with staff researchers to develop new research methods and approaches, conduct experiments exploiting new facilities and techniques, and solve high-priority combustion problems.

Visiting researcher program

The CRF has hosted visiting researchers from around the world, including postdocs, university faculty and graduate students, high school teachers, industrial collaborators, and national laboratory and government researchers. Together with CRF staff, they have expanded fundamental knowledge of combustion processes by pioneering research into new science and applied concepts.

Awards & Kudos

Judit Zádor was awarded a Gauss Professorship by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in Lower Saxony. The Gauss Professorship, established on the 100^th anniversary of Carl Friedrich Gauss’ death, offers outstanding scientists from outside Germany the opportunity to temporarily, and in a sense symbolically, occupy the chair of Carl Friedrich Gauss as a guest of the Academy.

Judit will work for 6 weeks in Göttingen next summer, collaborating with Prof. Dr. Alec Wodtke and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Troe on the dynamics and kinetics of heterogeneous catalysis.

For more than 30 years, Paul Miles has driven breakthroughs in engine-combustion research at Sandia National Laboratories; in recognition of his transformative contributions, he has been honored with the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office Lifetime Achievement Award. Paul’s honor is the culmination of decades of conducting and supervising research projects funded by the VTO, focusing on various engine combustion applications.

A Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), Paul has received many prestigious awards, including the SAE Horning, Myers, and McFarland awards, as well as the ASME IC Engines award. He has served as co-chair of the SAE Powertrain, Fuels, and Lubricants activities and is a member of the advisory committees for several international conferences. Paul retired from Sandia this fall after 33 years of service.

David W. Chandler was awarded the Dudley Herschbach Medal at the XXIX Dynamics Of Molecular Collisions meeting in Snowbird Utah, July 6-11, 2025.

Dr. Chandler received the medal for his pioneering work on the development of multiplex detection techniques with molecular beams and for using these techniques to investigate the dynamics of chemical reactions, collisions and electron ejection.