Fokion Egolfopoulos and Hai Wang will participate in the Energy Frontier Research Center for

Fokion Egolfopoulos

Combustion Science established by the Department of Energy.

Headquartered at Princeton University, the five year effort will use a projected $20 million budget to study the ways fuels burn in unprecedented detail, to go “from fundamentals to multi-scale predictive models for 21st century transportation fuels,” according to published plans.

Professors Wang and Egolfopoulos will be responsible for deriving fundamental experimental combustion database and the attendant theoretical models describing the chemistry and transport of the gas and nanoparticle phases.

The goal is to create "accurate combustion models by the use of three dimensional representations of the interacting chemistry functional groups, coupled with quantum chemical predictions of reaction rate coefficients, and to validate these models by comparisons with experimental data from a variety of measurements on gas-phase reactions."

Hai Wang

The research will significantly impact the combustion community by developing a suite of predictive high-fidelity simulation and combustion modeling capabilities for designing novel non-petroleum based fuels for advanced transportation engines, which will be characterized and validated by experiments at molecular and macroscopic scales.

Led by Professor Chung K. Law, the EFRC will utilize the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  It also includes planned collaborations with scientists at Case Western Reserve University, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota, the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Laboratory, and Stanford University, in addition to USC.

The Princeton EFRC is one of 46 energy centers the DOE announced April 27. It is the only one that will study combustion.

The Viterbi School is the site of one of the EFRCs, the Energy Frontiers Research Center for Emerging Materials for Solar Energy Conversion and Solid State Lighting. Wang is also participating in the University of Delaware EFRC for Rational Design of Innovative Catalytic Technologies for Biomass Derivative Utilization.