Proposal No. CTS-0420845 Principal Investigator: A. J. Marchese, Rowan University
This grant is for the development of a new drop tower apparatus and associated instrumentation that will enable researchers to perform fundamental studies in combustion and fluid dynamics. In most practical combustion systems, high temperature gradients combined with gravitational acceleration produce buoyancy-induced convective flows, which complicate experiments, obscure the underlying chemical and diffusive phenomena, and make direct numerical simulation of these systems exceedingly difficult. By performing experiments in reduced gravity facilities, which greatly reduce the role of buoyancy, significant advances in combustion theory have been accomplished in recent decades. While several facilities are available to effectively eliminate the ubiquitous presence of gravity, many of these facilities are exceedingly expensive to operate (e.g. orbiting spacecraft, sounding rockets, parabolic flight aircraft) and/or are not always readily available to many researchers due to geographical and scheduling limitations (e.g. drop towers). The proposed drop-tower apparatus will be designed, built and maintained by a team of faculty members at Rowan University who have substantial experience in performing microgravity combustion and fluid dynamics experiments. Development of a drop tower apparatus at Rowan University will enable the principal investigators to expand their research programs in flame spread, polymer combustion, droplet combustion, thermal diffusion and boiling heat transfer. Moreover, the facility will be made available to researchers at Princeton, Drexel, Rutgers, NJIT, University of Delaware and others. The commitment to build this facility at Rowan University, which currently houses a high-quality engineering program that emphasizes project-based learning at the undergraduate level, will further strengthen the relationship between graduate research institutions and undergraduate engineering institutions in the region.
