Forman A. Williams Professor of Engineering Physics and Combustion Email:  faw@ucsd.edu

 

Educational/Professional Background

Professor Williams received his BSE from Princeton University in 1955 and his PhD from California Institute of Technology in 1958. He then taught at Harvard University until 1964, at which time he joined the UCSD faculty. In January 1981, Professor Williams accepted the Robert H. Goddard Chair in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, where he remained until 1988, when he returned to UCSD to assume his present position. His field of specialization is combustion, and he is author of Combustion Theory (Addison, Wesley, 2nd ed., 1985) and co-author of Fundamental Aspects of Combustion (Oxford, 1993). He is a deputy editor of Combustion and Flame and a member of the editorial advisory boards of Combustion Science and Technology, Progress in Energy and Combustion Science and Archivium Combustionis.

 

Research Areas

Flame theory, combustion in turbulent flows, asymptotic methods in combustion, fire research, reactions in boundary layers, other areas of combustion and fluid dynamics.

 

Current Research Topics

• Prediction of NOx Emissions from Large Diesels.
• Theory of Flames with Real Chemistry.
• High-Pressure Combustion of Binary Fuel Sprays.
• Droplet Burning Experiments in the Space Shuttle.
• Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Fuel Droplets and Flames Subject to Straining Flows.
• Stretched Diffusion Flames in von Karman Swirling Flows.
• Compressible Turbulent Reactive Flows.
• Catalytic Combustion Fundamentals.
• Fundamentals of Acoustic Instability in Liquid-Propellant Rockets.

Recent publications

LINAN, A. & WILLIAMS, F. A. 1993 Fundamental Aspects of Combustion. Oxford University Press, New York.

MARGOLIS, S. B. & WILLIAMS, F. A. 1996 Effect of gas-phase thermal expansion on stability of deflagrations in porous energetic materials. International Journal of Multiphase Flow 22, 69-91.

WILLIAMS, F. A. 1996 "Combustion Processes Under Microgravity Conditions", Materials and Fluids Under Low Gravity, (L. Ratke, H. Walter and B. Feuerbacher, editors). Springier-Verlag, Berlin, 387-400.

LI, S. C. & WILLIAMS, F. A. 1996 Nitramine deflagration: Reduced chemical mechanism for primary flame facilitating simplified asymptotic analysis. Journal of Propulsion and Power 12, 302-309.

ZHANG, B. L. CARD, J. M., WILLIAMS, F. A. 1996 Application of rate-ratio asymptotics to the prediction of extinction for methanol droplet combustion. Combustion and Flame 105, 267-290.