CRF Visitor Program News August 2011

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Gaurav Bansal, post-doc with Jackie Chen

Gaurav‘s research was supported by the Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center. He worked on direct numerical simulation (DNS) of homogeneous charge compression ignition combustion with di-methyl ether, an oxygenated fuel, DNS of pulsating flame instabilities, and isometric mapping to identify reduced parameterizations in combustion. Gaurav has accepted a position with Intel Corporation in Oregon.

Michele Bardi, visitor with Lyle Pickett

Michele Bardi is visiting this summer from CMT Motores Térmicos at the Polytechnic University in Valencia, Spain. He is working to characterize the liquid penetration in vaporizing diesel sprays. The work is part of the Engine Combustion Network, which is performing comparative experiments in different high-temperature spray chambers applicable to engines, including those at CMT and Sandia.

Stewart Cant, visiting professor with Jackie Chen

Professor Stewart Cant, a long-term collaborator with the CRF, is visiting for three weeks this summer to work on analysis of our turbulent premixed flame direct numerical simulation data and a priori evaluation of flame surface density models for large-eddy simulation.

Katie Gabet, PhD student with Rob Barlow

Katie Gabet, a PhD student at Ohio State University, is working under Prof. Jeff Sutton to develop a Raman/Rayleigh scattering system for turbulent combustion measurements. She was here for one month to learn about our approach, including optical setup, calibration methods, data acquisition strategy, and methods of Raman/Rayleigh data analysis.

Dirk Geyer, visiting professor with Rob Barlow

Dirk Geyer is from Darmstadt, Germany, where he is a Professor at Hochschule Darmstadt and also collaborates closely with the combustion group of Prof. Andreas Dreizler at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Dirk’s visit is part of a long-running collaboration between Sandia and TU Darmstadt directed at developing and applying state-of-the-art methods for multiscalar measurements in turbulent hydrocarbon flames.

Tang-Wei Kuo, liason from General Motors

One year ago, GM and Sandia National Laboratories initiated a Strategic Alliance to strengthen mutual collaboration. To ensure close cooperation, a liaison position was created in which one person from GM was assigned to Sandia and one person from Sandia assigned to General Motors. Tang-Wei Kuo, thermosciences group manager in the Propulsion Systems Research Lab at GM, served as the GM liason, working primarily in the CRF.

Ajith Mascarenhas, post-doc with Jackie Chen

Ajith has been working on topological feature extraction and tracking methods applied to turbulent combustion. He worked closely with Gaurav Bansal to identify accurate low-dimensional manifolds (LDMs) embedded in high-dimensional (in phase space) turbulent combustion data using a novel technique based on Isomap. Isomap is a technique for dimensionality reduction that employs a distance metric locally to infer the underlying manifold of a dataset globally. Isomap can discover low-dimensional manifolds that may be nonlinearly embedded. Post-CRF, Ajith will be joining Google as software engineer in the Search Quality team.