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Graham Dixon-Lewis. 1 July 1922 −− 5 August
2010
Derek Bradley
Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 2012 58, 33-53, published 14 March 2012 originally
published online March 14, 2012
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
1 July 1922 — 5 August 2010
Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 58, 33–53 (2012)
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
1 July 1922 — 5 August 2010
Elected FRS 1995
By Derek Bradley FRS FREng
School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Graham Dixon-Lewis was a physical chemist who pioneered both experimental and mathematical studies that revealed the nature of flames. His researches, based on what was known
of the chemical kinetics of hydrogen oxidation, also showed the way forward for the mathematical modelling of laminar flame structures for other fuels. These models have proved
invaluable in providing the input data also for the mathematical modelling of practical turbulent flames.
Early years and school
Graham Lewis was born on 1 July 1922, in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, the first of two children
of Daniel Watson Lewis and Eleanor Jane Lewis (née Anderson). His father, the son of a road
haulage contractor, was a colliery clerk and salesman. His mother was a nurse, descended
from Scandinavian seafaring stock. Both her father and grandfather were master mariners.
Her Danish grandfather settled in the UK after marriage to a Northumbrian farmer’s daughter.
It was a tradition in the Anderson family that males be given the middle name of Dixon. For
Graham, this oversight was ultimately rectified by a change in the family name to DixonLewis by deed poll in 1944. However, his younger sister had been christened Beryl Dixon,
and consequently became Beryl Dixon Dixon-Lewis. She married and emigrated to South
Africa in 1959.
Graham’s upbringing in South Wales at the time of the 1930s Depression entailed strict
financial management at home, but this was combined with strong encouragement for him
to persevere and succeed. His mother possessed a wide range of useful general knowledge;
books were available, but there was no radio. He attended Durham Road Elementary School
at Newport and in 1933 gained an Entrance Scholarship to the Newport High School for Boys,
where his education covered a broad range of subjects. He later wrote that this unpopular
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2011.0024
35
This publication is © 2012 The Royal Society
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Biographical Memoirs
c­ ompetitive selection process was mitigated in his community by the provision of an intermediate type of school with a separate entrance test. The effect was that of a comprehensive school
for the whole community, with subdivision into separate, smaller institutions with defined
objectives and of a size within which both staff and pupils could more readily identify.
Between the ages of 11 and 17 years he was closely involved in the Boy Scout movement,
eventually qualifying as a King’s Scout. In that capacity he was one of four scouts from
Monmouthshire on the coronation route of King George VI. In sport, he was a middle distance
runner (880 yards and 1 mile). He broke the school record for 880 yards in 1939, during the
Monmouthshire school championships, and in the following year won the 1-mile race in the
Monmouthshire versus Glamorgan schools competition.
He wrote of the devotion of the teachers at Newport with warm affection. Two sixth-form
teachers stood out in his memory: Mr E. P. Glover, who adroitly mixed mathematics with
down-to-earth philosophy and Mr D. J. B. Summers, a former Gibbs scholar at Oxford who
taught him chemistry. His Higher School Certificate subjects were pure and applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Mr Summers gave unstintingly of his free time to introduce
advanced topics during his third, Oxford and Cambridge Scholarship, year. His teachers
provided suitable material for further reading. In 1939 he was awarded a State Scholarship
and in 1940 a Welsh Foundation Scholarship to become a Scholar of Jesus College, Oxford.
Qualifications for this award included being a native of Monmouthshire.
Oxford years
From 1940 to 1944 his tutors at Oxford were L. A. Woodward DPhil Leipzig, and D. L.
Chapman FRS, both eminent physical chemists. Chapman’s first paper, ‘On the rate of explosion in gases’ (Chapman 1899), had brought him international renown. It presented the first
sound theoretical treatment of what is now called a detonation (although this term was not used
in the paper). As an explosion develops, its velocity is continually changing until the wave
becomes permanent and of uniform velocity. J. W. (Jack) Linnett FRS, in his contribution to
Bowen’s biographical memoir on Chapman (Bowen 1958), wrote that the key to deriving this
velocity was Chapman’s assumption that it must be a minimum because ‘no reason can be
discovered for its changing to another permanent wave having a greater uniform velocity and
a greater maximum pressure.’ Jouguet, quite independently, later made a similar analysis and,
today, almost every paper on detonation refers to the Chapman–Jouguet velocity. Calculation
of that velocity requires values of specific heats at high temperatures and pressures, and
Chapman derived some of these from experimental values of the measured velocities. One of
Chapman’s colleagues referred to ‘his gift of winning affection and respect, owing something
to his gentleness of manner and to his, artless, unaffected nature’: a not inappropriate description of the mature Dixon-Lewis himself.
Graham’s final-year project in the Chemistry Honours School was related to the prevention of muzzle flash from guns. This brought him into contact with another giant of British
combustion chemistry, Jack Linnett, who had returned from a two-year period at Harvard in
1938, after working with, among others, G. B. Kistiakowsky (ForMemRS 1960). In 1939
most university scientists were being mobilized for the war effort. Professor C. N. (later Sir
Cyril) Hinshelwood FRS led a team at Oxford working for the Respirator Sub-Committee of
the Chemical Defence Board of the Ministry of Supply, and in 1943 Linnett became involved
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
37
Figure 1. ‘Lewis Graham’ (centre) after training for the Oxford and Cambridge Sports.
(Source: Tatler and Bystander.)
in the suppression of muzzle flash. The work entailed, among other things, firing shots into
sandbags in the old Balliol laboratories, which extended beneath the Senior Common Room
(Buckingham 1977). The project also involved investigating the chemical influences of additives on the rich flammability limit of hydrogen–air mixtures. At the culmination of these
­studies in 1944 Dixon-Lewis obtained a class II honours BA (Oxford) degree in chemistry.
Further examination of the Part II thesis also gave entitlement to supplicate for BSc.
He continued his earlier athletic pursuits at Oxford and was a member of the university
team against Cambridge (figure 1), and of the Oxford and Cambridge team versus that of the
Amateur Athletics Association in 1942. He was president of the College Athletics Club from
1942 to 1944, and secretary of the Hockey Clubs from 1942 to 1943. In addition he was,
sequentially, secretary, treasurer, vice-president and president of the Leoline Jenkins Scientific
Society, 1942–43. The Jesus College Magazine noted that the President gave a paper on
‘paper-making’.
His postgraduate studies from 1944 to 1946 at Oxford were supervised by Linnett, and
further consolidated his growing interest in flame and combustion. He was awarded DPhil
(Oxford) in 1948 for his doctoral thesis ‘Some thermal properties of gases’. It covered detailed
studies of flammability phenomena and the explosion limits of H2–CO–N2–O2 systems. He left
Oxford in 1946 to take up a post as a research chemist at Courtaulds Fundamental Research
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Biographical Memoirs
Laboratory, Maidenhead, Berkshire. There, over three productive years, he researched on the
kinetics of vinyl polymerization (1)*, in collaboration with Dr C. H. Bamford and Dr M. J. S.
Dewar. He continued his collaboration with Linnett on H2–CO–air limits of inflammability (2)
and H2–CO explosion limits (3, 4), up to 1953, by which time he had arrived in Leeds. While
at Oxford he had met Patricia Mary Best, the only daughter of Aubrey George and Gladys
Best, and they were married in Oxford on 15 April 1950.
The oxidation of hydrogen
The recently nationalized energy industries of coal mining, gas and electrical generation were
endowed with fine research establishments. The Gas Act of 1948 nationalized the 1064 privately owned and municipal separate local gas companies into 12 Area Gas Boards, reshaping
the entire industry. The Gas Council was established to improve liaison between these and
the Ministry of Fuel and Power. In 1949 the continuing appeal of combustion research caused
Graham to leave Courtaulds and take up a post as Senior Scientific Officer with the Gas
Research Board at Beckenham, Kent. At that time, the chemical kinetics of gaseous oxidation
were studied at relatively low temperatures of up to about 800 K, usually in heated Pyrex vessels. This technique was complicated by the surface chemical reactions that could occur on
the vessel walls, and Linnett had been drawn to the study of the recombination of atoms on
such surfaces. Graham had become enthused with the idea of measuring the microstructure
of premixed flames, free from the influence of walls, as a means of studying reaction kinetics
at somewhat higher temperatures. In collaboration with M. J. G. Wilson he developed a light
deflection technique for measuring refractive index gradients in flames. Values of refractive
index were then converted to temperatures to yield temperature profiles through the flames.
Professor Felix Weinberg FRS comments:
Dixon-Lewis and Wilson started with a truly heroic attempt to analyse the deflection pattern following the passage of the light beam through a flame stabilized on a Bunsen burner. I had the good
fortune of working in a department whose Head, Sir Alfred Egerton FRS, had developed a flat
flame burner with J. Powling. This proved the perfect tool for this type of project. It was ideal for
optical studies, not only because of its approximation to uni-dimensionality and all round accessibility, but because it operated close to limits of flammability where the flame thickness is close
to ten times that for stoichiometric mixtures. It was adopted by Graham in the next phase of his
work. A further widening of this zone can be achieved by going to lower pressures—an approach
adopted, in conjunction with increasingly sophisticated thermocouples, notably by Friedman and
several others.
The Gas Research Board was dissolved in 1953 and Graham joined the staff of the rather
more academically orientated Gas Council–University of Leeds Joint Research Committee.
This was housed in the then Department of Gas and Fuel Industries with Metallurgy at the
university, and this post enabled him to pursue fundamental researches on flames and combustion. Working with the quietly taciturn Geoff Isles, whom he greatly respected, he refined the
optical technique for the measurement of temperature profiles and the understanding of how
they resulted from the interplay of molecular diffusion, thermal conduction and chemical heat
release (5).
*Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text.
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
39
Since Hinshelwood’s pioneering studies of the chain reaction mechanisms for the oxidation
of hydrogen, the relevant experimental studies had involved largely isothermal reactions in
Pyrex vessels heated in the range of about 710–820 K. Vessels might be coated with KCl or
boric acid to study the effect of surface reactions, about which there was much uncertainty,
particularly those involving HO2 and H2O2 (Baldwin et al. 1962). The hydroperoxyl radical,
HO2, had been postulated as an intermediate in numerous oxidation reaction mechanisms.
Mechanisms involving it were capable of giving detailed explanations of the explosion limits
and reaction rates in hydrogen–oxygen systems in such vessels, but only at these relatively
low temperatures.
At that time there was a belief that the radical would be too unstable to exist in flames. It
was assumed that most of the flame reactions occur at too high a temperature for the HO2forming reaction [1] to compete with the vital chain-branching reaction [2].
H + O2 + M → HO2 + M;
[1]
H + O2 → OH + O.
[2]
However, the evidence from the detailed computations that Graham performed with Alan
Williams for a slow-burning H2–O2–N2 flame and for two faster-burning (higher-temperature)
flames suggested that this assumption might, in many cases, be invalid (6).
The slow-burning hydrogen flame
From this background of experimental expertise and emerging chemical kinetic detail, DixonLewis and Williams presented a key pioneering paper at the Ninth International Symposium
on Combustion at Cornell University in 1962, on the structure of a slow-burning hydrogen
flame on an Egerton–Powling flat-flame burner (7). This paper combines exacting measurements of profiles through the flame zone of gas velocity, gas temperature and concentrations
of stable species with the use of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. Relative concentrations of H and OH are found by the sodium chemiluminescence technique of Padley
& Sugden (1959). A chemical kinetic model with seven reactions is presented, and with due
objectivity and modesty about this very early attempt at hydrogen flame mathematical modelling, the authors commented: ‘It has not yet been possible to reproduce the experimental
flame by the numerical approach, although the level of agreement is reasonable.’ In view of
the paper’s importance, the abstract of it is reproduced below.
Some observations on the structure of a slow burning flame supported by the reaction
between hydrogen and oxygen at atmospheric pressure
G. Dixon-Lewis and A. Williams
The complete analysis of a flame structure consists of studying the variation of the temperature
and all the composition parameters with distance y perpendicular to the flame front. By means
of such analyses it is possible to investigate the mechanism and kinetics of the processes controlling the flame. However, for such investigations to have maximum effectiveness it is necessary to use the simplest flames consistent with the type of reaction mechanism. For this reason
hydrogen–oxygen flames have for some time been studied in this laboratory as comparatively
simple flames supported by a branched chain reaction system. The flame studied in this paper
has an initial composition of 4.604 per cent oxygen, 18.830 per cent hydrogen and 76.560 per
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Biographical Memoirs
cent nitrogen. This flame is within the range of hydrogen–oxygen–nitrogen flames which can be
stabilized at atmospheric pressure on an Egerton–Powling type of flat flame burner. For a matrix
temperature of 336 K the theoretical flame temperature is 1078 K, and the burning velocity,
measured by means of particle track technique, is 9.2 cm/sec. The flame burns as a flat disc with
the reacting gases flowing in a direction normal to the plane of the reaction zone. This produces
an approximately one-dimensional flow system, and thus simplifies the analysis. In this paper the
results of both an experimental and a theoretical investigation of the flame are described. These
are combined in an attempt to give information about the flame mechanism. In the theoretical
investigation the effects of alterations in some of the reaction and transport parameters on the
flame have also been studied.
An interesting discussion followed, involving key researchers in the area. To give a flavour
of this and of the understanding of flame structure and the reaction kinetics at that time, some
of the comments of one discussor and the authors’ response are given below.
Discussor:
The central problem posed in this paper is the lack of agreement between the rate of heat release
obtained by differentiating the measured temperature profile and the same quantity deduced from
the measured H atom concentration and the rate constant for H atom recombination. The maximum heat release is derived from the temperature profile at a point where its gradient is extremely
steep, making the differentiation difficult; and the hydrogen atom concentration must be determined from the rate of the deuterium exchange reaction at a point where this method is losing its
validity. The exchange rate constant is not without error and the atom concentration obtained must
be squared and multiplied by the recombination rate constant which is also somewhat uncertain. In
view of this, a discrepancy of a factor of ten in the two heat release rates is not at all surprising.
What is more serious is that the heat release and H atom profiles do not agree in shape as well
as absolute magnitude. When the latter is squared as required by the proposed heat release mechanism and compared with the profile determined from the temperature, the temperature profile is
more sharply peaked. … Certainly, the calculations involving HO2 or a change in the branching
rate constant are not satisfactory as they either do not reproduce the burning velocity or fail to
solve the discrepancy.
Authors’ response:
It seems to us that perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the preliminary kinetic analysis
outlined as the starting point for the theoretical section of the paper. This preliminary analysis
indicates the non-applicability of the assumption that the major heat releasing process is the
recombination reaction. The subsequent numerical solutions support this, and show that near the
maximum heat release rate the less exothermic but much faster chain branching cycle provides the
principal heat releasing step, when reasonable values are employed for the rate constants. …
The picture that emerges from this work is that of a flame in which H atoms are produced very
rapidly in the region of the maximum heat release rate. The majority of these diffuse out towards
the hot and cold boundaries of the flame before recombining, so that in the region of the maxima
in the profiles most of the heat release is associated with the branching cycle of reactions.
In assessing the contributions of HO2 reactions, we would agree that as far as agreement with
experiment is concerned these are not satisfactory. But then the reaction mechanisms involving
HO2 as investigated in the paper are clearly oversimplified and ­ unrealistic. Alteration of the
branching constant can clearly be made to reproduce the burning ­velocity alone, whatever reaction
mechanism is assumed, but, as pointed out in the paper, some ­further kinetic analysis is necessary
to obtain agreement with burning velocity and ­profiles.
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
41
Computations and measurements of flame structures
At that time, solutions of the steady-state flame conservation equations with uncertain chain
branching and chain-breaking equations were difficult to obtain for anything other than the
simplest chemical kinetics. The hydrogen flame was of practical interest: the low-temperature researches over several decades had provided valuable information on its kinetics and,
with the advent of digital computers, the time was ripe to attempt solutions of the complete
equations. In conjunction with experimental studies, including the measurement of laminar
burning velocities, these could elucidate something of the high-temperature kinetics. For the
initial computations in (6) and (7), geared mechanical calculators were employed, as they
had been in 1956 in the numerical solutions of the hydrazine decomposition flame by D. B.
Spalding (FRS 1983). The situation was transformed at Leeds in the autumn of 1957, when
Professor A. S. Douglas set up the Computer Laboratory of the university. A Ferranti Pegasus
computer was installed as a central university machine in the disused Eldon chapel across the
perilous Woodhouse Lane. It was known as Lucifer (Leeds University Computing Installation
FERranti). Douglas was succeeded by G. B. Cook, who, with G. K. Adams, in 1960 used a
Ferranti Mark 1* computer also to obtain solutions for the hydrazine flame.
Also at that time, it was not to be expected that an Oxford physical chemist such as Graham
would be comfortable with the numerical analysis of equations of such complexity by using
a computer. Professor Allan Hayhurst has pointed out that, writing of the prewar period, P. V.
Danckwerts FRS (Danckwerts 1981) had described chemistry as ‘an essentially literary subject at Oxford at that time. I was taught no physics and no mathematics. It was said that if an
Oxford chemist encountered a differential coefficient in a book, he turned the page; if he saw
an integral sign, he closed the book.’ No doubt Graham was fired by the potentialities of the
newly available computational power for revealing flame structures. His ability to rise to the
challenge partly stemmed from the mathematical enthusiasms of his teacher, Glover, his tutor,
Chapman, and his research supervisor, Linnett. Apparently, nothing pleased Linnett more than
for one of his protégés ‘to use his results to do a bit of mathematics’ (Buckingham 1977).
Hayhurst has conjectured that Dixon-Lewis was probably better off teaching himself, once he
became conscious of the mathematical need. The mathematician Professor Barry Greenberg,
whose PhD research was supervised by Graham, has commented:
I discovered that Graham combined a tremendous background in chemical kinetics with the ability
to tackle numerically the solution of the flame conservation equations, including detailed transport
properties and chemistry. I recall distinctly one occasion when he ‘complained’ that the mathematicians thought of him as a chemist whereas the chemists thought of him as a mathematician!
David Smith recalls those early days of computing with Graham:
I shared an office with him. Each day we met up, we would exchange a few words before he was
off to the computer (before the days of PC links), saying, ‘Must get some more runs going’, and
then he was away for most of the day. When he did spend time in the office, he was generally
evaluating and analysing results. Typically, he would be poring over a graph pad, adding points
to an already crowded graph. Not for him the dumping of data into a spreadsheet; according to
him, ‘I prefer it this way; you can see much better what the results are telling you.’ I think that
neatly sums up Graham’s approach to science: profound insights, meticulous care and attention
to detail.
The seminal studies of (6) and (7) gave rise to several further papers that combined experimental and computational studies of one-dimensional laminar flames particularly involving
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Biographical Memoirs
H and OH reactions (8–14). These considerably advanced the general understanding of flame
structure. In the course of them, it had become clear that the derivation of accurate reaction
rates necessitated accurate expressions for the various multi-component diffusional fluxes,
thermal diffusional fluxes and thermal fluxes. Because of the primary role of the chainbranching reaction [2], the rate of diffusion of H atoms was particularly important. Here, the
experimental measurements of their diffusion coefficient by Tony Clifford in the Department
of Physical Chemistry at Leeds were of particular importance to Graham.
The flame equations were successfully formulated in (17), but molecular transport coefficients were still demanding attention in collaborative researches 18 years later (38). In what
one commentator described as a series of almost classical papers on the hydrogen flame,
published by the Royal Society (15, 17–20, 23–25, 28, 30), Dixon-Lewis and his co-workers
deployed exceptional experimental skill and versatility, combined with a profound understanding of the theoretical aspects of the subject, to unravel the complexities of his chosen
system. His work was highly influential, not just in relation to flame itself but also in the wider
fields of chemical kinetics and fuel technology.
Since 1952, the biennial International Combustion Symposia have been key meetings in
the combustion research calendar, attended by scientists and engineers of international repute.
As a result of contacts and discussions at these meetings during his earlier years, Dixon-Lewis
had the good fortune in 1965 to spend a long vacation as a visiting professor working with
A. A. Westenberg at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University at Silver
Spring, Maryland. This involved the use of a fast-flow system in combination with quantitative electron spin resonance spectroscopy, for the measurement of the room-temperature rate
coefficient for the reaction
CO + OH → CO2 + H,
[3]
a key reaction rate that he predicted correctly would be needed in his future computer codes.
This collaboration was followed in 1970–71 by one with D. J. Williams, who had been
seconded from Australia to work in Graham’s group. This resulted in further work on CO
oxidation, but in a predominantly hydrogen flame. He and Williams agreed to collaborate in
writing a chapter for a book in the Comprehensive chemical kinetics series, edited by C. H.
Bamford and C. F. H. Tipper. Unfortunately, Williams returned to Australia before the article
was completed, and Graham suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage towards the end of 1972
and spent the best part of 1973 out of action. Of this period Barry Greenberg writes:
The doctors had given instructions that he should not be involved in any work and visitors to the
hospital were restricted. However, one of his research assistants managed to visit him and was
immediately given detailed instructions as to what parametric studies to carry out with the latest
version of his code. And an update was expected (‘but don’t tell my wife’!). I was therefore not
surprised to find him sitting by the computer, perusing mounds of data, when I returned to Leeds
for a short sabbatical some years ago, several years after he had retired.
These delays meant the chapter was only finally published in 1977 (29). This was followed by (31) and (33) in 1981. The latter involved computed solutions of the structures of
H2–CO–O2–H2O–N2 flames and the prediction of values of burning velocities at atmospheric
pressure. These values were compared with those measured by a variety of other researchers.
It was found that the major part of the observed changes in burning velocity from those of
H2–air mixtures could be satisfactorily explained by the addition of the single reaction [3] to
the mechanism already established for the H2–O2–N2 flame system.
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
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By the 1960s the UK was importing significant amounts of liquefied natural gas from Africa.
In 1966, after a North Sea survey had revealed large amounts of natural gas, it was decided that
the UK should switch from the use of coal-based town gas to natural gas. The flow of North Sea
gas began a year later, and over the next 10 years British Gas undertook a massive conversion of
appliances from town gas to natural gas. The Gas Act of 1972 restructured the company, creating
the British Gas Corporation, later to be privatized by the 1986 Gas Act. The problems posed by
the redesign of appliances prompted the Gas Council to encourage associated research. DixonLewis and Williams responded with an early study of the methane reactions that ensued when
traces of methane were added to H2–O2–N2 flames in 1967 (16). This was followed in 1971 by
a paper with Garside, Kilham, Roberts and Williams (22) on the combustion of methane.
By 1982 a comprehensive chemical kinetic scheme, comprising 50 reactions, had been formulated for methane–air flames (34). The paper also covered the practical problem of comparing computed one-dimensional values of burning velocity with those measured in flames that
were clearly not one-dimensional. This initial modelling of burning velocities showed them to
be sensitive to the rate expressions for reaction [2] and, to a lesser extent, reaction [3], whereas
variations in the other rate expressions were of little importance. This achievement was the
culmination of years of patient, logical, ‘building block’ research that began with hydrogen
flame kinetics, followed by studies of the effects of adding, first, trace amounts of CO and
then, finally, traces of CH4, to the hydrogen flame.
The Leeds environment
For a few decades after his arrival in Leeds in 1953, Graham, a Welshman cast among dour
Yorkshire persons, lived a delusion that this was only a temporary visit, but he was willing
to give it a go and perhaps stay a little longer than originally intended. Perhaps the esteem in
which his fellow Welshman John Charles was held by the followers of Leeds United football
club and Graham’s growing respect for the then successful club and its manager, Don Revie,
were factors in settling him. Another factor might have been the pedigree of sustained combustion research at the university and its predecessor, the Yorkshire College. Whatever the
reason, he remained there until his sudden death at a bus stop in the centre of Leeds, on his
way home from work on 5 August 2010, in his 89th year.
Sir Edward Thorpe, whose interests covered coal dust explosions and the composition of
paraffin, was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Yorkshire College in 1874 and later
became the Government Chemist. He appointed a mechanical engineer, Sir Dugald Clerk
(FRS 1908), who later became a Director of the National Gas Engine Company, as his assistant. Thorpe was succeeded in 1884 by Sir Arthur Smithells (FRS 1901), one of the pioneers
of the science underlying industrial combustion. His links with the gas industry led to the
formation of the Department of Fuel and Metallurgy in 1906, headed by Professor W. A. Bone
FRS. These three professors had all researched at Heidelberg with R. W. Bunsen. There was
no PhD study at Leeds until 1917, when it was introduced with the aims of extending the
country’s research base and attracting foreign students. Professor W. T. David arrived at the
Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering in 1922 from Cardiff, after researching with
Bertram Hopkinson FRS on gaseous explosions at Cambridge. Professor D. T. A. Townend,
who, along with Bone, was a pioneer researcher of high-pressure combustion, was appointed
to the Livesey Chair of Coal Gas and Fuel Industries in 1938.
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Biographical Memoirs
In 1971 Graham was appointed a Senior Research Fellow and Honorary Reader in Flame
and Combustion Science. He also took a full part in undergraduate teaching and in the
supervision of postgraduate students in the Fuel Department. For many years he was also
an associate lecturer in the Department of Physical Chemistry. He transferred completely to
the academic staff in 1977 after a period of 24 years, during which he had been generously
funded by British Gas through the Gas Council, with supplementary funding for research
fellows, students and the provision of equipment. In 1978 he was appointed to a personal
chair.
Along with colleagues in the departments of Fuel and Energy, Physical Chemistry, and
Mechanical Engineering, he had, since 1967, played an important role in establishing and
sustaining the internationally renowned Centre for Studies in Combustion and Energy. The
combustion researchers who were members of the Centre covered a remarkable diversity
of talents and included Gordon Andrews, Donald Baulch, Terry Boddington, Ian Campbell,
Andy Clarke, Jim Garside, Phil Gaskell, Alan Gray, Brian Gray, Peter Gray (FRS 1977),
Bernard Gibbs, John Griffiths, John Kilham, Arthur Leah, Mike Pilling CBE, Andy
McIntosh, Stephen Scott, Chris Sheppard, John Taylor, Alan Williams CBE FREng, Paul
Williams, Graham, and the present writer. The Centre ran a successful MSc course and
enhanced a variety of research collaborations. This interdisciplinary approach also extended
to collaborations with members of the Department of Applied Mathematics, in particular
with John Brindley, Malcolm Bloor, David Crighton (FRS 1993), Allin Goldsworthy and
Sam Falle. Graham developed strong links through his mathematical modelling with Allin
Goldsworthy (26–28, 32).
In addition to his collaborations with the Department of Physical Chemistry on ­gaseous
diffusion of atoms, there were collaborations on the ozone decomposition flame (21).
He also particularly valued the evaluations of chemical kinetic data by D. L. Baulch,
D. D. Drysdale and their co-workers. He collaborated with the Department of Mechanical
Engineering on the measurement and computation of methanol–air flame structures and
burning velocities in a low-pressure flat-flame burner (44). The same burner was used in a
first step towards establishing a model for the combustion of pulverized coal. This involved
first measuring and modelling the oxidation rates of carbon particles introduced into laminar
methane–air flames (35, 45), and this was followed by the modelling of the combustion of
ultrafine coal (46).
Externally, Graham’s national and international reputation ensured that his services
were widely sought by professional bodies and journals. He was a founding member of the
British Section of the Combustion Institute, in 1954, and served as a committee member
and as the section’s honorary treasurer from 1969 to 1975. A group of 20 or so section
members will also remember with great fondness Graham’s role as ‘Obergruppenführer’
of the British contingent who attended the Seventeenth Combustion Symposium in Tokyo
in 1974 and the highly enjoyable tour of Japan that followed it. This was a responsibility
that one might not have naturally delegated to Graham, because he never seemed to carry
a watch—and Graham did share a confidence, at the time, with our chairman that his family would not trust him to get them as far as Bridlington! He was a regular member of the
institute’s Programme Committee for International Symposia, the Flame Chemistry Board
of the International Flame Research Foundation, and of the Editorial Board of Combustion
and Flame.
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Stretched flames
The one-dimensional flat flame was ideal for minimizing any complexities arising from the
fluid flow and enabling attention to be focused on the chemical kinetics. However, as has
been pointed out, many practical premixed laminar flames are two-dimensional, and also
three-dimensional when the instabilities, to which they are prone, develop. It was therefore
not surprising that the growing number of researchers into flame structures should investigate
these dimensional effects. By the 1980s, advances in computers had enabled more complex
chemically reacting flows to be modelled, and developments in laser diagnostics were able
to yield more details of the flame structure. A two-dimensional laboratory flow configuration
emerged that was particularly useful, both computationally and experimentally. This involved
two opposed streams of gaseous reactants approaching each other from opposite sides and
forming a stagnation plane, as indicated in figure 2.
A near-planar flame is formed between the two flows. If A is the area of a material surface
and t is time, its stretch rate is defined as A−1dA/dt. As the flow rates increase, so does the
stretch rate. Such counter-flow burners can be employed for both premixed and non-premixed
flames. Increasing the stretch rate eventually leads to abrupt flame extinction. The computed
flame structures and extinction stretch rates are not only of interest in their own right; they
also can be used as a key input into laminar flamelet models of turbulent combustion. A complication in turbulent combustion is the existence of a distribution of different values of stretch
rate. Depending on the details of the turbulence modelling, the effect of the stretch rate on
either the localized laminar burning velocity or the local volumetric rate of heat release must
be evaluated, in what is usually a complex flow field.
In 1986 several European research groups participated in a programme sponsored by the
Commission of the European Communities on ‘Turbulent combustion and diagnostics’. Both
Graham and the highly respected Jürgen Warnatz from Heidelberg participated in a subset of
the programme devoted to the development of a ‘Strained flame library for turbulent combustion modelling’. The aim was to compute the necessary laminar reaction rate parameters
through the flame, for different mixtures and strain rates, to provide a library of data for practical turbulent flame computations (37, 39, 40, 43). A strained flame library was indeed compiled, and Graham’s data were used in the flamelet model of turbulent combustion developed
by Derek Bradley (FRS 1988) and the group in the Mechanical Engineering Department at
Leeds. Their use of it in the modelling of methane–air and propane–air turbulent combustion
in a jet-stirred reactor in 1988 was the first application of this approach (Ribert et al. 2006),
which has subsequently become widespread.
Since 1969, Graham and Pat had become enthusiastic holiday campers, and family camping holidays ranged over the length and breadth of Europe. Graham developed a taste for the
wines of Alsace and fine red Burgundy wines. This often necessitated extensive detours in the
return journeys to pass through these regions, to restock the Leeds ‘cellars’. The Neapolitan
combustion scientist Ninni D’Alessio wrote that Graham
told me about the frightening experience of camping in Italy with his family. He softly spoke of
thunderstorms, flooding, stealing and other disasters. Then he concluded that when the family
considered where to go for holidays the following year, they clearly voted for Italy again. To a
southern European, Graham is the prototype of the Englishman with a bit of eccentricity, which
is gradually disappearing from the European scene, together with the sentimental Neapolitan, the
cartesian Frenchman, and the philosophical German.
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Biographical Memoirs
Figure 2. Opposed flow flame configurations. (Reproduced from (48); copyright © The Royal Society.)
All this, combined with Pat’s high culinary skills and their warm personalities, made them
wonderful hosts. Graham attended evening classes in French, which were usually followed
by a glass or two of wine. When the Leeds local authority could no longer finance the classes
they continued in private houses, but with rather more emphasis on the wine. Graham became
quite fluent in French and greatly enjoyed his admission to the wine-tasting Confrairie de
St Vincent, which had a parallel group in Lille.
Graham’s international research role also flourished in the 1980s. International groups,
from Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Heidelberg, Kyoto, Leeds and
Sandia National Laboratories, California, had come together at a workshop in Heidelberg in
1983. The results of their ensuing collaboration on the calculated structures and extinction limits of cylindrical methane–air counter-flow diffusion flames were presented at the Twentieth
Symposium on Combustion in 1984 at Ann Arbor (36). A brief visit to Bob Kee and Jim Miller
at Sandia in 1984 resulted in the implementation of the Leeds multi-component transport
properties computer program into the Chemkin software (38). This collaboration led, in 1987,
to Graham’s spending six months as a visiting scientist at Sandia, in a further fruitful collaboration. This resulted in a paper at the Twenty-Second Symposium in 1988 with Bob Kee,
Jim Miller and Greg Evans on the structure and extinction of strained opposed flow premixed
methane–air flames (41). This paper was subsequently awarded a Silver Medal at the 1990
Combustion Symposium, at which Graham was also presented with the Institute’s Alfred C.
Egerton Gold Medal. He was the first person to receive both awards at a symposium. He also
delivered an invited plenary lecture, ‘Structure of laminar flames’ (42).
Indian summer
In the previous year, 1987, Graham had ‘retired’ from his original chair. There then followed a
lengthy Indian summer of further scientific achievement during which, as a research professor,
he continued to research and publish assiduously. It was a regular (and always pleasurable)
occasion for Leeds colleagues to have a chance meeting with him, well into 2010, either as he
walked to the university from the bus that dropped him in the city centre, or otherwise in the
School of Mechanical Engineering, where he eventually had his desk and computer access.
At the International Combustion Symposium at Edinburgh in 2000, the entire worldwide
combustion community banded together to present him with a book of congratulatory letters,
noting his many professional contributions and his impact on our lives. The most heartfelt of
these letters recalled many times how Graham contributed to our personal as well as professional lives, recalling many treasured moments.
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Figure 3. Graham Dixon-Lewis on his election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. (Online version in colour.)
He received the 1993 Royal Society of Chemistry’s Award for Combustion and Hydrocarbon
Oxidation Chemistry in 1994. In the following year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
(figure 3) and was awarded the Dionizi Smolenski Medal of the Combustion Section of the Polish
Academy of Sciences. He received the Sugden Award of the British Section of the Combustion
Institute in 1997 and in 2008 the Huw Edwards Prize of the Institute of Physics. In 1993–94
he was a senior research fellow at Cambridge University, at the invitation of Ken Bray FRS,
where he researched on flames close to the flammability limit. In 1994 he was a visiting professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Strömungsforschung, Göttingen, at the invitation of Professor
H. Gg. Wagner. Between 1980 and 2000 he participated in several combustion meetings in Poland,
a Fire and Explosion Hazards Seminar in Moscow (47), and Flame Structure Seminars in Siberia
(40) and Kazakhstan (43). He also acquired some knowledge of both Polish and Russian.
On 14 April 2010, Graham made what would prove to be his last scientific presentation.
This was at the Sixth Fire and Explosion Hazards Seminar at Weetwood Hall Conference
Centre and Hotel, Leeds. It covered the role of radiative loss combined with the flame stretch
rate in extinguishing near-limit hydrogen flames. The numerical analysis also allowed for
Lewis number effects (49). On the following evening, at the seminar banquet at the Royal
Armouries, the delegates were on their feet toasting Graham and Pat on the occasion of their
diamond wedding anniversary (figure 4). There was a further private celebratory party a few
days later. His last social gathering was on 16 July at an informal party thrown by Elaine and
Danny Oran at the New Inn in the countryside to the north of Leeds to celebrate Elaine’s
award of an honorary DSc at Leeds, for her contributions to the mathematical modelling of
flames and detonations. He did not attend the 33rd Combustion Symposium in Beijing at the
beginning of August. At the end of it, as knots of delegates were wandering at leisure around
the region of the Tsinghua University campus before going home, the sad news was diffusing:
truly, Graham was no longer with us.
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Biographical Memoirs
Figure 4. Graham and Pat responding to the diamond wedding toast at the Royal Armouries. (Note the suit of
armour on Graham’s right.) (Online version in colour.)
Tribute
In the words of Charlie Westbrook, the President of the Combustion Institute:
The combustion community has lost one of its finest scientists and one of its most beloved colleagues. We all deeply admired him for his cheerful personality, his love for his work, and his
willingness to help anyone who asked for his thoughts. His astonishing technical productivity
covered more than half a century, and he was a pioneer at the leading edge of computational fuel
science for his entire career. But even more than his professional accomplishments it was his
lively and happy personality that charmed us all.
Professor Weinberg wrote for this memoir:
When, in 1998, Professor Derek Dunn-Rankin and I needed the most accurate and detailed information on the structure of a particular unstretched premixed flame, to compute the modification to
the location of the schlieren image due to axial symmetry of the refractive index field, no experimental measurements could compete with the precision and the convenience in use of Graham’s
simulations. I still remember with much gratitude Graham’s enthusiastic help in making available
to us his, previously unpublished, stoichiometric methane–air flame structure and his guidance in
making optimum use of it. Graham had a most engaging, friendly and welcoming personality and
is greatly missed by all who had the pleasure of meeting him.
Professor Hayhurst writes:
As a young man, after I had published a few papers in the Faraday Society on the measurement
of the diffusion coefficients of the alkali metal atoms, as well as other species emitting light
when in a flame, I later discovered that Graham had been working on the same topic and I had
just ‘pipped him to the post’. I spoke to him, apologised and suggested that we write something
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Graham Dixon-Lewis
49
together on the topic. He was generosity personified, claiming that I needed to get an academic
job and didn’t need him interfering. I, on the other hand, had prevented him from publishing,
but that didn’t worry him. This generous paternalism from Graham towards me continued all
his life. I first found out about his computations in 1968. Nobody until then had dared attempt
any calculations of the evolution of events in a flame; people like Morris Sugden, who really
understood what was happening in and around a flame front, did not have much awareness of
what numerical analysis and computers could contribute towards sorting out these problems.
Graham’s work thus came as a stunning and dazzling revelation, which he went on to develop
even further.
The outstanding researches of Graham and his group on laminar flame structure ranked
him as one of the world’s foremost authorities in the field. He was universally admired for
his warm friendliness and quiet humour. He was a perfectionist in all his researches. His
well-known remark, ‘I agree with you up to a point’, alerted serious consideration of what
lay beyond that point. With regard to higher education, before his death he had become
increasingly concerned that the universities were being asked to fulfil too many functions
at one time. The decline in the number of students opting for science-based subjects was a
particular cause for concern. Reversal of this trend would not be helped by the relatively
high fees required to cover the costs of course provision for these subjects. He believed
encouragement into these areas would require very serious considerations at national
level.
Graham Dixon-Lewis is survived by his wife, Pat, their son, Andrew, and daughters
Stephanie and Melanie. In the family he was the patriarch, but he would never have achieved
what he did without Pat’s support in taking care of the more practical things in life. As a father
he believed his greatest contribution to his children would be an education and experience that
would give them confidence to cope with life. He could be a hard taskmaster, but always with
the idea that they should not be happy with anything less than the best. He was a great believer
in equal opportunities for both girls and boys. He had a strong, if not quite conventional,
Christian faith and had been a reader in the church for 30 years; he was often complimented
on his clarity and soft Welsh accent. During his time in Yorkshire he grew to love rambling in
the Yorkshire Dales. He had aspirations to improve his bridge playing and even of becoming
a pianist, had not the more interesting flame equations required so much coaxing before the
solutions to them converged.
In a letter to Graham some years ago, the trenchant observer and combustion scientist Bob
Dibble recalled an afternoon in Livermore, so rainy that they had to abort a biking expedition they had planned together. Graham’s bike had been loaned to him for the duration of his
stay.
We put the borrowed bicycle upside-down and rolled the front tire for several hours in order to put
‘miles’ on the odometer before you returned the bike. You were concerned that the lack of miles
on the odometer would suggest ungratefulness to the person who loaned you the bike. By the end
of the afternoon we had put on many miles while sitting in the living room. My kind of travel!
Hoping to join you for more great trips and associated illuminated discussions that include my
discovery that a turbulent non-premixed flame is largely an ensemble of Dixon-Lewis opposed
flames.
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Biographical Memoirs
Honours
1990Silver Medal of the Combustion Institute (with Bob Kee, Jim Miller and Greg
Evans)
Alfred C. Egerton Gold Medal of the Combustion Institute for ‘distinguished, continuing and encouraging contributions to the field of combustion’
1994 1993 Royal Society of Chemistry Award for Combustion and Hydrocarbon Oxidation
Chemistry
1995Elected Fellow of the Royal Society
1995 Dionizi Smolenski Medal of the Combustion Section of the Polish Academy of
Sciences
1997Sugden Award of the British Section of the Combustion Institute for the most significant contribution to combustion research by a member in 1996
2008Huw Edwards Prize of the Institute of Physics, for services to combustion physics
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the many colleagues and friends of Graham who have kindly spent time formulating their impressions of the man and his work. They include Tony Clifford at Leeds; Barry Greenberg at the Israel Institute of
Technology, Haifa; John Griffiths at Leeds; Allan Hayhurst, Chairman of the British Section of the Combustion
Institute at Cambridge; Christopher Jeens, the Archivist at Jesus College Oxford; Mike Pilling CBE at Leeds and
formerly of Jesus College, Oxford; David Smith, formerly at British Gas and a Director of the Combustion Institute;
Felix Weinberg FRS at Imperial College; Charlie Westbrook, President of the Combustion Institute at Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory, California; and Alan Williams CBE FREng at Leeds. Thanks are also due to Franco Tamanini
at FM Global, Norwood, Massachusetts, for the photograph in figure 4. Particular thanks are due to both Pat DixonLewis and Graham and Pat’s daughter, Stephanie Somers, for their help and generosity in providing documentation
and information.
The frontispiece photograph was taken in 1995 by Prudence Cuming Associates and is copyright © The Royal
Society.
References to other authors
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Buckingham, A. D. 1977 John Wilfrid Linnett, 3 August 1913 – 7 November 1975. Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 23,
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Chapman, D. L. 1899 VI. On the rate of explosion in gases. Phil. Mag. (5) 47, 90–104.
Danckwerts, P. V. 1981 Insights into chemical engineering: selected papers of P. V. Danckwerts. Oxford: Pergamon
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Bibliography
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