The group for 2014 including Professors, undergraduate students, graduate students and foreign exchange students out front of the Engineering building.

Matt joined the lab in the summer of 2012 as an undergraduate special studies student in ME 499. With his extensive background in manufacturing he quickly became the hardware specialist for the lab. As an undergrad he helped design and develop both Flame Tracker II and Flame Tracker III for the drop tower here at SDSU.He then joined the Mechanical Engineering 4+1 program to obtain both his undergrad and graduate degrees simultaneously.

He has since then continued to help guide all manufacturing of experimental equipment including the newly finished radiometer and flame stabilization on the Flame Stabilizer using a non-contact temperature measurement by use of a thermopile. His research is in the study of the effect of fuel thickness on opposed flow downward spreading flame over PMMA. He would like to especially thank Dr. Bhattacharjee for all his help and guidance, Kenny for all his Matlab codes and patience, and Wynn for all the experience he bestowed upon me as an undergrad.

snmfab@hotmail.com

San Diego, Ca

Kristine joined.....

Aslihan joined.....

Ivan joined the lab in spring 2014 as a grad student in Mechanical Engineering and started working on computational projects. Ivan finished his undergraduate studies at UCSB. He is currently working on computational modeling of radiation emitted from flames.

Ivan wants to thank Dr. Bhattacharjee and the other members of the lab for their support.

Prof. Bhattacharjee.....

Kevin joined the team as part of his Senior class project in the fall of 2010. He helped assemble the tower including the counter weight system and painting along with his colleague Matthew Parker. The main contribution to the project was the design of the test rig platform that houses the test sample along with the provisions for recording data. Thanks to Dr. Bhattacharjee for the opportunity to work on this project and to the many other team members who were involved.

kevin.eakin77@gmail.com

Carlsbad, Ca

Dr. Paolini...

Ken joined the lab in September of 2012 as an undergraduate student looking to gain hands on experience with research and software development. Using his knowledge learned in his MATLAB coursework; he was able to transition most of the experimental devices to be completely controlled utilizing MATLAB�s various functions and toolboxes.

He is currently enrolled as a Mechanical Engineering 4+1 student and is providing support for the newly developed radiometer as well as concurrently developing an apparatus to study ignition as a function of heat flux and time delay. Ken would like to thank Dr. Bhattacharjee, Dr. Paolini, and the entire lab group for their influence and support during the past couple years.

Blake joined the lab Fall semester 2014 as an undergraduate applying to the Mechanical Engineering 4+1 program. He helped in the development of the radiometer.

Danny joined the lab in the fall of 2014 as a an undergrad. Upon joining, he completed his ME499 special studies class with his work on the flame tunnel experiment. Danny's efforts in the lab consist of data processing and image analysis using Flame Analyzer, however the majority of his effort has been designing and fabricating a frame to rotate the flame tunnel in order to run the experiments at angles up to 180 degrees.

He also assumed the duty of building a new sealed door for the flame tower to be depressurized. Danny has enjoyed his time and work in the lab and would like to thank Dr. bhattacharjee for the opportunity. He would also like to thank everybody working in the lab for their shared knowledge and hard work.

Jakob joined the Computational Thermodynamics Laboratory in the spring semester of 2012 as a foreign exchange student in the undergraduate ME499 Class. He was involved in many projects, but focused mainly on the conduction of experimental research on flame spread in opposed and concurrent flows over cellulose and PMMA. Jakob would like to thank Dr. Bhattacharjee and the rest of the team for the amazing time and the opportunity to gain hands-on research experience.

Jakob Widok

Jakobwidok85@gmail.com

de.linkedin.com/in/jakobwidok

Pittsburgh, PA / L�denscheid, Germany

Francesco joined the team on September 2014 as research assistant under the engineering student exchange program present between SDSU and University of Pisa. He is a graduate aerospace engineering student and he is now working on his thesis for the master of science in space engineering of the University of Pisa. His work within Dr. Bhattacharjee�s lab is mainly focused on the Flame Tunnel Experiment, trying to find and demonstrate a correlation between opposed flow velocity, boundary layer development distance and extinction on downward spreading flame over PMMA and cellulose.

The next step will be the gathering and processing of more data, obtained for different angles of flame spread with respect to gravity with a new configuration of the experiment. His special thanks go to Dr. Bhattacharjee for his guidance and teachings and to Matt for his patience in helping with the experiment's hardware.

Luca is an Italian student who joined the lab between the fall of 2013 and summer of 2014 for his Master Thesis in Space Engineering, thanks to an exchange program between University of Pisa and SDSU. His research was mainly carried out using the Flame Tunnel; starting from the sensors calibration, he conducted many experiments to investigate various aspects of the flame spread over thin solid fuels, like sample width and boundary layer effects for different opposing velocities.

The main topic of his work became the influence of boundary layer and fuel thickness on flame extinction. He would like to thank Dr. Bhattacharjee for the trust and help given, and all the guys who were always helpful and made this experience unique.

Gaurav joined SDSU as Master student in Spring 2009 in Aerospace Engg Department. He did his research and Thesis course work with Dr. Sooby. He joined the combustion lab in fall of 2011 as Master�s student. He completed his research and thesis course work as part of master�s program in lab working on simulation of flame spread rate over thin fuel.

His thesis work on modeling of flame spread over thin fuel in downward configuration in presence of forced convection. He studied the effect of fuel half thickness, opposed flow velocity, ambient oxygen concentration and ambient pressure level on the flame spread rate. He made comparison of flame spread rate of complete combustion, equilibrium model and experiments with different half thicknesses for PMMA and Cellulose fuel. He would like to thanks Dr. Subrata Bhattacharjee for his constant guidance and support throughout his thesis work.

He gradauted in Dec 2012 and currently working as CAE Engineer in GM.

gaurav0141@gmail.com

Nehal Dalal joined the lab in Summer 2011 as Master's Student in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Thermal science. With his extensive experience in Design, Manufacturing and software skills he helped in developing experimental approach in measuring Flame spread rate. A novel experimental approach is developed to measure the downward spreading flame velocity over the thermally thin ash less filter paper (cellulose). A motion control system is developed with the thermocouple as the sensor and it converts the downward spreading flame into a stationary flame using a PID controller. This set up is called the flame tracker.

Different refinement of the flame tracker algorithm has been tested in this work. Flame spread rate and flame profiles are studied using the flame tracker setup. The flame tracker results are then compared to the traditional approach obtained from the digital video of the flame spread. The results establish that the stationary flame created by the flame tracker is comparable to the spreading flame. The approach using two thermocouples has been found as the best alternative.

He would deeply thank Dr.Subrata Bhattacharjee for all his guidance and support as his mentor. Also he would like to express sincere appreciation to Dr.Fletcher Miller and Dr. Christopher Paolini for serving and contributing their knowledge which helped for this project. Also he would specially thank Takeshi Nagatta, from Japan who helped him in collecting and processing few data required for this experimental approach in measuring flame spread rate.

Troy, Michigan

nehal_d@depusa.com

Micah joined the lab in the Fall of 2014 as an undergraduate special studies student in ME 499. Since joining the lab, Micah has worked with the Matlab based image processing code developed for flame spread analysis to analyze the data from the conducted experiment in the International Space Station. As a San Diego native of 22 years, Micah is looking forward to graduating with a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from SDSU in December 2015.

He would like to thank Dr. Bhattacharjee for giving him the opportunity to work with such a lively, knowledgeable, and fun group of students and professors.

Rohit has a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering. He worked at the computational Lab from September 2010 to August 2012. Rohit used Professor Bhattacharjee�s CFD code to study flame behavior under forced convection in a zero gravity environment. This code was written in FORTRAN and had to be accessed using UNIX commands.

For his research, he studied flame extinction by varying parameters such as fuel thickness, ambient conditions and flow development distances. MATLAB was extensively utilized to plot temperature curves for each well converged case. He ran simulations that included and excluded effects of radiation to understand its significance.

Results from full blow-off parametric studies were combined into single plots where differences at each opposed air velocity could be compared. Variation in results seen by parameterizing the flow development distance was rectified by developing a relation between the velocity seen at the tip of the flame and velocity at a certain distance away from the flame.

A master�s thesis titled Numerical Study of Interactions of Hydrodynamics, Kinetics and Radiation in flames was produced. Some of these results were republished in two other journal papers where Rohit was a co-author.

As a note from Rohit, �None of the above could have been accomplished without the inputs of Professor Subrata Bhattacharjee, Fletcher Miller and Christopher Paolini.�

Detroit, Michigan

rohitnagarkar@gmail.com

Alex, Chris, Stephan and Sascha are international Students from Germany who took part in a special study project for Prof. Bhattacharjee. In the fall of 2014 they helped out on different projects, which included using the Matlab based Flame analysis software to investigate flame spread over solid fuels.Their expertise covered designing a pressurized door system for the drop tower, detailing their work progress in power point, analyzing data and cropping videos for analysis. The work was very informative and interesting.

The team they worked with is friendly, professional and also up for a bit fun. They can highly recommend joining Prof. Bhattacharjee�s projects for American or International students, to work on small projects like they did or investigating big ones like a Master�s thesis. They had a great time and would like to thank the whole team for working with them and wish them all the best for the future.