Claude Goldsmith
Brown University, RI·Engineering
Ammonia can burn without releasing carbon dioxide, making it a possible bridge fuel toward carbon-neutral energy. But burning ammonia can produce nitrogen oxides (NOx).
- Fields
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
ammonia combustion
nitrogen oxides
NOx
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure branching fractions, the share of a reaction going to each possible product, for key NOx-related reactions in ammonia combustion, using shock tube experiments.
- Test whether tracking two or more species at once, such as NO, NO2, N2O and water, lowers branching-fraction uncertainty compared with current NOx literature values.
- Use tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) to record time-resolved species concentrations and temperature behind reflected shocks for use as kinetic model validation targets.
More about the research
These pollutants harm human health, add to smog and can worsen climate change, and regulations increasingly limit them. Engineers need accurate computer models to predict how much NOx a new fuel or engine will make. Those models depend on knowing exactly how key chemical reactions proceed.
Why it matters
Better branching fractions could make NOx predictions more reliable for engineers judging how new fuels like ammonia or new engine designs affect emissions. This could help meet tightening pollution rules. The improved NOx chemistry may also help atmospheric scientists modeling local smog and global climate change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Carmen Guerra-Garcia
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Engineering·Early-career
Develop numerical models of one-dimensional plasma-assisted flamelets to predict how nanosecond pulsed plasmas change laminar flame speed and extinction strain rate for ammonia, hydrogen and methane blends.
Gayan Wijeratne
University of Alabama, AL·Chemistry
Synthesize heme-nitrogen oxide model complexes with systematically varied ligands in the primary and secondary coordination spheres, to find which features of the heme center control the geometry and electronic structure of these intermediates.
Omid Samimi Abianeh
Wayne State University, MI·Engineering
Measure flame propagation speed of ammonia–dimethyl ether blends across a wide range of temperatures, pressures, fuel-to-air ratios and Damköhler numbers using the RCM-FLAME apparatus.
The school
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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