SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Scientists and engineers at Reaction Design®, a leading developer of combustion simulation software, have been selected to receive the prestigious Arch T. Colwell Merit Award. The annual award program recognizes authors of outstanding papers presented at SAE meetings.
“We are proud of the members of our team who were selected to win this award amongst such highly regarded engineers, scientists, and researchers,” said Bernie Rosenthal, CEO of Reaction Design. “This work presents a suite of software that enables the use of essential chemistry details in the representation of fuels in an engine combustion simulation. I applaud the work of the talented individuals at Reaction Design who continue to work hard to empower automotive companies to develop high performance, environmentally friendly products faster and at lower costs.”
Reaction Design’s paper, “Applying Detailed Kinetics to Realistic Engine Simulation: The Surrogate Blend Optimizer and Mechanism Reduction Strategies,” authored by Chitralkumar V. Naik, Karthik Puduppakkam, Cheng Wang, Jeyapandian Kottalam, Long Liang, Devin Hodgson, and Ellen Meeks, was one among eight selected for this year’s honor from all published papers for SAE meetings during 2011.
The Arch T. Colwell Merit Award will be presented at the SAE World Congress during the Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan. Additionally, visit Reaction Design at booth #1037 during the show, which will be held April 24–26, 2012.
About the Arch T. Colwell Merit Award
This award, established in 1965, annually recognizes the authors of papers of outstanding technical or professional merit. Papers are judged primarily for their value as new contributions to existing knowledge of mobility engineering. The award was funded by the late Arch T. Colwell, who served SAE International in many capacities for nearly 50 years, including a term as President in 1941.
About the Authors
Chitralkumar V. Naik
Chitralkumar V. Naik (Ph.D., Colorado School of Mines) leads the Engineering Development team at Reaction Design. His expertise includes reactive flow modeling using detailed chemical kinetics. He is a technical lead for the Model Fuels Consortium and uses modeling and simulation to address the emerging challenges experienced by the automotive, turbine, and oil and gas industries. He also collaborates with scientists from various academic institutes and national laboratories on various research projects. Prior to joining Reaction Design, Dr. Naik worked at an energy consulting company and developed predictive software for mercury emissions from utility gas-cleaning systems of coal-fired power plants.
Karthik Puduppakkam
Dr. Puduppakkam is a principal contributor to the Model Fuels Consortium development work, applying his broad expertise in both computational reacting-flow simulation and combustion theory to the careful validation of kinetics mechanisms. He has studied a wide range of fuels, from gaseous hydrocarbons to liquid jet and diesel fuels, biodiesels, and solid propellants. He has a strong interest in seeing detailed kinetics used effectively in practical combustor and engine simulations. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in India, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Brigham Young University (BYU).
Cheng Wang
Cheng Wang, staff development engineer, has been involved in research and engineering for kinetics modeling, mechanism reduction, and computational fluid dynamics modeling with Reaction Design. His main focus in the Model Fuels Consortium is to develop automated mechanism reduction processes that can satisfy user-defined constraints. He received a B.S. degree (1994) in chemical engineering and computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, an M.S. degree (1996) in chemical engineering practice, and a Ph.D. degree (1999) in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his Ph.D. research, Dr. Wang developed uncertainty analysis techniques to study the effect of parametric uncertainty in complex engineering systems.
Jeyapandian Kottalam
Dr. Kottalam has been working in the chemical industry since 1991. His main interests are applications of modern object-oriented software design, design patterns, and algorithms to traditional scientific and engineering applications. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from Michigan State University. He also holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in chemistry from the University of Madras, India, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, respectively.
Long Liang
Dr. Long Liang was a post-doctoral fellow at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company in New Jersey. He also worked at Ford Motor Company. His main research interests are in the area of multidimensional modeling of engine processes, including fuel sprays, spark ignition, turbulent flame propagation, chemical kinetics, and mechanism reduction, as well as basic flow solution and mesh generation techniques in CFD. His research has been published in numerous combustion and engineering journals, as well as SAE journals and transactions. In 2010, he was the recipient of the SAE Excellence in Oral Presentation Award. He is a member of SAE, the Combustion Institute, and Sigma Xi (the Scientific Research Society). Dr. Liang received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.S. and B.S. degrees from Beijing Jiaotong University (China), all in mechanical engineering.
Devin Hodgson
Dr. Devin W. Hodgson is a senior developer involved in software development and maintenance at Reaction Design. He received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in 2003.
Ellen Meeks
Dr. Meeks has led product development and engineering services for 12 years at Reaction Design, where she has overseen the development of innovative simulation technology targeting clean combustion. In recent years she has also directed the Model Fuels Consortium, an industry-funded program that focuses on developing advanced methods for predicting fuel effects and emissions in automotive engine simulations. Previously, she spent 10 years as a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in the areas of combustion, materials, and plasma processing, where she was also a principal developer of the third-generation CHEMKIN software. She is a mechanical engineer by training, with a Ph.D. from Stanford University. An author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, she has had a career-long interest in applying computer simulation toward improving product design, increasing process efficiency, and reducing environmental impact.
About Reaction Design
Reaction Design, a San Diego, California-based software supplier, enables transportation manufacturers and energy companies to rapidly achieve their clean technology goals by automating the analysis of chemical processes via computer simulation and modeling solutions.
Reaction Design is the exclusive developer and distributor of CHEMKIN and CHEMKIN-PRO, the de facto standard for modeling gas-phase and surface chemistry that provides engineers ultra-fast access to reliable answers that save time and money in the development process. Reaction Design’s FORTÉ is an advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation package for realistic 3D modeling of fuel effects in internal combustion engines with superior time-to-solution metrics that fit in commercial development timeframes. Reaction Design’s ENERGICO software brings accurate chemistry simulation to gas turbine and boiler/furnace combustion systems using automated reactor network analysis. Reaction Design also offers the CHEMKIN-CFD software module, which brings detailed kinetics modeling to other engineering applications, such as CFD packages.
Reaction Design’s world-class engineers, chemists, and programmers have expertise that spans multi-scale engineering from the molecule to the production plant. Reaction Design serves more than 400 customers in the commercial, government, and academic markets.
Reaction Design can be found online at www.reactiondesign.com
About SAE International
SAE International is a global association of more than 134,000 engineers and related technical experts in the aerospace, automotive, and commercial vehicle industries. SAE International’s core competencies are life-long learning and voluntary consensus standards development. SAE International’s charitable arm is the SAE Foundation, which supports many programs, including A World in Motion® and the Collegiate Design Series.
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