This award supports a three year collaborative research project between Professor Forman Williams of the University of California, San Diego and Professor Junichi Furukawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Technical College in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study concerning burning velocities of flamelets in turbulent premixed flames. The objective is to improve understanding of the flame structure in the flamelet regime. The flamelet regime is the regime in which the chemical times are short compared with the turbulence times. In this regime, the turbulent flame is composed of an ensemble of moving premixed laminar flamelets. The U.S. collaborator has derived theoretical relationships between the turbulence strain rates and the structures and propagation velocities of the flamelets. The Japanese collaborator has developed a four-element electrostatic probe that potentially can measure these properties of flamelets in premixed turbulent flames.
This project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researchers' expertise is in the area of theoretical analyses and understanding and the Japanese have expertise in the experimental techniques and results. If successful, this approach could be widely adopted, since it is easier to operate and the apparatus is less expensive than the optical approaches. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. ***
