Professor Joseph M. Powers on Combustion Thermodynamics and Dynamics
What motivated you to write this book? I had developed a graduate course in combustion and taught it over the past twenty years. I found that no single book suited my purposes well, so I made considerable effort to build a set of customized course notes. It is my hope that a book will allow this material to reach a wider audience.
Who is the primary audience for your book? The primary audience is graduate students studying combustion theory. Researchers in both laboratories and industry who focus their efforts on simulation of combustion phenomena should also find it useful. There is a large audience throughout such institutions who perform numerical simulation of combustion. The book is designed so that practitioners of this art can find utility in a source that gives a modern discussion of the underlying applied mathematical issues common in realistic combustion models. Other books are available and should be consulted for discretization and numerical solution strategies. For such strategies to be successful, understanding of the basic continuum models is essential, and that is the focus of the book.
What are the key challenges this audience faces? My sense is that much computational combustion literature could be better augmented by foundational results available from applied mathematics. Often it is difficult to identify closed form analytic or asymptotic solutions in the major texts that provide sufficient detail for a practitioner to reproduce these results. And those many computational scientists who are interested in formal verification studies require a rich set of closed form solutions. Such solutions can be used to test a numerical algorithm and give the user confidence that it can address problems for which no analytic solutions are available. Another key challenge faced by this audience is that notions from equilibrium physical chemistry and thermodynamics are often difficult to reconcile with classical dynamical systems theory. Both disciplines have as their concerns the equilibrium states of a system as well as a consideration of the approach to equilibrium and its stability. Both disciplines are important in describing the combustion phenomena, but it is fair to say that the existing combustion literature is better tuned to equilibrium thermochemistry than to dynamic systems theory.
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