The kinetics of oxidation at high pressure is a basic yet poorly understood problem of combustion. The proposed faculty should enable this research to resolve the mechanisms involved in the combustion of alkynes fuels approaching the complexity of actual automotive fuels. Special care will be brought to the design and instrumentation of this program, while numerical programs will enable a swift interpretation of the collected data. High pressure combustion is the key to efficient combustion (thermodynamics cycles). Yet it is still an art rather than a science: "knocking" is an example of an ambiguous, unresolved high pressure problem. This study should be a good first step toward a scientific resolution of this problem.
