AME 514
Applications of
Combustion
Lecture 15: Future needs in
combustion research
Emerging Technologies in Reacting Flows (Lecture 3)
 Applications of combustion (aka “chemically reacting flow”)
knowledge to other fields (Lecture 1)
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Frontal polymerization
Bacteria growth
Inertial confinement fusion
Astrophysical combustion
 New technologies (Lecture 2)
 Transient plasma ignition
 HCCI engines
 Microbial fuel cells
 Future needs in combustion research (Lecture 3)
 2014 Grand Challenges Workshop
 Writing a proposal of your own
 White paper
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Grand Challenges Workshop (2014)
 The combustion research community laments the plethora of
“incremental” works - should we be doing something else?
 What would be a good use of our time and resources?
 This workshop was an experiment to address this question
 “Grass roots” movement, not beholden to any industry or funding
agency – funded only by NSF
 Our customers are ourselves (the combustion research community)
particular those early in their career
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Grand Challenges Workshop – scope
 Energy conversion - starting with chemical energy in the form of
fuels (e.g. hydrocarbons, alcohols, hydrogen) or fuel carriers (e.g.
borohydrides), how can one more effectively (e.g. energy density,
power density, range, emissions, safety) obtain electrical, shaft or
kinetic (propulsive) power, new materials or processing techniques,
etc.?
 PDR’s opinion - significant progress results from discovering and
applying new physical and chemical phenomena and their
interactions; improved modeling of known physics and chemistry
has significant practical value but rarely yields transformational
progress
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What is a valid Grand Challenge?
 Model - NAE Grand Challenges:
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org
(though too broad for our humble community)
 Must be “transformative” “disruptive” etc., not “incremental”
 Must be actionable, i.e. specific enough to conceive and execute a
plan and decide if it has been solved
 If solved, results in the ability to do something useful that could not
have been done before
 Should be an action, e.g. “Burn fast with less turbulence” rather
than a topic, e.g. “Fast burning with less turbulence”
 Should not be “white paper” or “quad chart” with specific research
plan (what to do, not how to do it)
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What is a valid Grand Challenge?
 Not too broad or narrow
 Too broad: Understand turbulent combustion
 OK: Burn fast with less turbulence
 Too narrow: Use acoustics to burn faster
 “Improve…” not as compelling as a “binary” challenge, i.e. do
something that cannot currently be done
 “Understand” “predict” “model” etc. not sufficient – what can you do
better if you can model it?
 If Edison had a perfect model of the light bulb, he still could not have
invented the fluorescent lamp, LED or laser
 Evaluated (go / no go) based on
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Value to the community and society if solved
Feasibility
NOT on likelihood of an agency funding the work
NOT prioritized
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The Grand Challenges
1. Develop more efficient engines by reducing heat loss
 Heat loss is the biggest source of efficiency loss in engines
 Insulation or coating of limited value – bottleneck in heat transfer is
from the gas to the cylinder wall, not across the wall
 Need lower heat transfer coefficients, e.g. via low turbulence, but
then how to burn fast enough? Transient Plasma Ignition or ???
2. Fabricate nanostructured devices using combustion
 Many researchers make materials using combustion processes
 Advantage is high throughput compared to other methods, but
quality and purity are low
 Making a functioning device (electrical, optical, chemical,
mechanical) with the throughput of combustion processes would
be a huge advancement
3. Develop cyber-connected combustion using Big Data Analytics
 Every vehicle has many sensors connected to a computer and a
data port; can be connected to The Cloud via a smartphone
 Connect them all together – make every vehicle on the road a
moving combustion laboratory
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The Grand Challenges
4. Integrate energy conversion and CO2 capture
 CO2 production is the Achilles Heel of combustion
 Current approach – make CO2 then figure out what to do with it – how
can we combine production and capture of CO2
 Deep sea – methane clathrates (CH4  5.75 H2O) could be reacted and
replaced by CO2 clathrates (CO2  6 H2O)
5. Eliminate thermoacoustic instabilities
 Gas turbine combustor performance limited by acoustic waves coupling
to heat release, leads to runaway “thermoacoustic instabilities”
 How to suppress? Active control of fuel, air, geometry?
6. Control reaction pathways (e.g. control radical pools via additives,
plasmas, ???)
 HCCI engines: identify “radical buffer” (analogous to pH buffer) to allow
slower combustion once reaction starts; probably must contain C, H, O,
N atoms only
 “Superknock” (Kalghatgi and Bradley, 2012) observed in small,
turbocharged engines (e.g. Ford EcoBoost™ - thought to be due to
catalytic effect metallic particles in oil!
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The Grand Challenges
7. Create fuel-based sub-kW power systems (electrical or motive)
 We’ve covered this enough already (Lectures 4 – 6)
8. Predict and mitigate wildland fires in real time
 Current wildland fire models are not real-time - can help with
planning but not suppression
 What is the minimum set of measurements and models required to
help first responders use available resources most effectively?
9. Enable fuel, product and operational flexibility (omnivorous
combustion)
 Few combustion devices are fuel flexible, e.g. gasoline vs. Diesel
 Traditional + new fuels – biofuels, Fischer-Tropsch, …
 How to make fuel flexible? Premixed + nonpremixed (RCCI),
thermal or plasma reforming, catalysis, …
10. Incorporate nonequilibrium effects in prediction of explosions
 Current models of explosions employ equilibrium models for
kinetics, vibration/rotation – Boltzmann distributions
 Extremely high pressures, fast reactions, shock fronts in
explosions – not valid – unknown effects on explosion behavior
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Benefits to society
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Energy efficiency and CO2 reduction
Environmental quality
Affordable energy
Safety (fire and explosion protection)
Energy sustainability
Innovative manufacturing
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Writing research proposals (1/4)
1.
Have at least one good, novel, clever idea
• “Business as usual” proposals don’t sell
• Review panels give a lot of credit to proposals that are new and
innovative
• Panels try to find a reason to like proposals with a good idea, no
matter what weaknesses might exist
2. Pose specific, testable hypotheses
• Don’t say “we will measure the effect of x on y etc. etc.”
• Do say “based on the material presented in the introduction, it
is our hypothesis that y will decrease as x increases, until x
reaches a critical value, after which y will increase”
• Show that you have a specific idea and intend to test it
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Writing research proposals (2/4)
3. Avoid the “kitchen sink” mentality
• Don’t say, “we will do detailed and extensive measurements of
everything using every imaginable diagnostic tool and vary every
possible experimental parameter” - it suggests you don’t know
what’s important
• Do say, “here is the minimum set of measurements and conditions
needed to test these hypotheses; if we have time and money left
over, here are the cool things we will do afterwards”
4. Explain your end game
• Many proposals don’t say what they will do once they have the
results and how it can be used to test a hypothesis
5. Don’t dwell on past work
• Some proposers brag about what they’ve done and don’t get to the
point of what they propose to do next until page 11 (out of 15 max.)
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Writing research proposals (3/4)
Summary - where’s the beef?
• Ask yourself:
• What is the one most important idea in this proposal?
• What will be the one most important consequence if it is funded?
… and write the proposal to “sell” these points
• Get the panel curious about your idea, make the panel ask themselves,
“hmmm, I wonder what would happen…?”
• Suggested NSF proposal “page budget”
# pages
Topic
1
Introduction - what your topic is and why it is important
3
1
Previous work - what has been done in this area; complain about
what knowledge is lacking
Objectives - very specifically what will you do and why it is better
1
Hypotheses - what you think will happen
5
Approach - how you will test these hypotheses – experimental or
computational apparatus, etc.
Closure - what you will do with the data once you have it
2
2
Broader impact – applications of the research and educational merit
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AME 514 - Spring 2017 - Lecture 15
Writing research proposals (4/4)
Panel dynamics
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Typically ≈ 8 panel members, 25 proposals
Each proposal read by 3 reviewers – 1 lead, 2 others
Each reviewer discusses his/her opinion
Entire panel gives comments / feedback
Reviewers may revise comments based on panel discussion
Proposals are ranked after all are discussed
You must have a champion – someone who believes in your proposal
and is willing to argue for it
• Every panel has different personnel and different dynamics
• Learn these dynamics first-hand: ask relevant NSF program
officer(s) for invitation to be on a review panel – also looks good on
your résumé
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References
Kalghatgi, G.T., Bradley, D. (2012). Pre-ignition and 'super-knock' in turbo-charged spark-ignition engines,
Int. J. Engine Research, Vol. 13, pp. 399-414 (DOI 10.1177/1468087411431890)
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