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At My House We Call Them "Uh-Oh's"

Posted by Hemos on from the the-little-voices-told-me-to-burn-them dept.

Kowgod writes "For those of you who have never checked out the NCSA's Access Magazine, this issue's cover story will hopefully spark your interest. It seems an aerospace engineer, Cyrus K. Madnia, over at the State University of New York at Buffalo is trying to use super-computers to model fire. By tinkering with the mechanics and components of a flame he hopes to discover ways to burn fuel more efficiently, thus emitting less pollution. Kind of an odd twist on the quest for the zero emission internal combustion engine."

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. This is called research!! by Knobby · · Score: 5

    Hey guys! There are a lot of people throughout the world trying to model combustion with the goal of improved efficiency.. Madnia at SUNY UB is pretty good (a little close-minded) but he's not the only guy out there this sort of work...

    For those who haven't read much about CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) here's a little overview.. DNS (Direct Numerical Simulation) solves the equations of motion for a flow to obtain information for all the scales (wavenumber information).. The problems with DNS include restrictions on Reynolds number, limited run time (very few statistically independent samples), and domain size. I believe that currently the largest DNS that has been performed was on a 1024^3 element grid.. Unfortunately, it still really isn't fine enough to deal with a Reynolds number beyond a few hundred (many practical flows have Re #'s ~1e6+).. To model higher Reynolds number flows many researchers have moved to LES (Large Eddy Simulation) type approaches, where the equations are solved directly for scales above a certain range, and the subgrid scales are handled using a variety of models. LES has a handful of problems too.. The big problem when using LES for combustion work is that a large percentage of the mixing that these researchers need to manipulate in order to improve their efficiency occurs in the subgrid scales that they're modelling...

  2. From the article by Dr_Cheeks · · Score: 5
    From the article (pg 2):
    ....The result is a library of flames....
    But surely that's what discussion forums like Slashdot and various USENET groups are for?
    --

  3. You Go Now! by Kowgod · · Score: 5

    Whaaa? Man, how can someone screw up such a classic line!?

    FIRST of all, its not Smokey the Bear, its Hosey the Bear.

    And second, as you can clearly read here, the line truly is:

    Hosey: You're not going to start any fires, are you?
    Ralph: At my house, we call them, "uh-ohs."

     Why oh why don't they avoid this by teaching Simpsons in school?

    --
    -- Mesmer is the Dairy King Remove your panties to email me.