Combustion Chemistry



The Combustion Chemistry program, under the principal sponsorship of the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, seeks to reveal the key chemical processes that underlie the complex mechanisms of combustion. The program emphasizes determination of the rates and mechanisms of chemical reactions, characterization of molecular structure and energetics, and measurement and modeling of idealized combustion devices. Researchers in the program employ laser-based pump/probe techniques to interrogate chemical reactivity and structure, ion-imaging to simultaneously measure velocity and internal-state distributions of reaction products, and experiments in the femtosecond domain to directly probe energy conversion within a molecule. In other work, molecular photolysis is coupled with absorption/fluorescence detection methods to determine the thermal rate coefficients and product distributions for reactions that constitute the individual steps in the combustion chain process. Current computational efforts include ab initio calculations of molecular structure and energetics and computer modeling of the complete kinetics of combustion processes in both laminar and turbulent environments.