Vinicius Maron Sauer
California State University-Northridge, CA·Engineering
Combustion powers everything from a lit match to power plants, but flames remain hard to predict. That matters for reducing harmful emissions, uncontrolled fires and climate impacts.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
combustion
flames
counterflow burner
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- Design new non-premixed counterflow burners using quadric surfaces and their combinations to create unevenly curved flames like those in practical combustion systems.
- Measure how stretch and uneven curvature affect flame structure, stability, temperature, soot formation and extinction, using particle image velocimetry and soot and thin filament pyrometry.
- Develop a simplified theory for stretched, unevenly curved non-premixed flames, using potential flow solutions and infinitely fast chemistry.
More about the research
Engineers usually model real burners with simplified flames. These simplifications often ignore curvature, how a flame front bends, and stretch, how it is pulled and deformed by the flow. Both are present in real flames. This project asks how uneven curvature and stretch change the structure, temperature, stability, soot formation and extinction of flames.
Why it matters
Combustion models that ignore flame curvature and stretch can misjudge soot and flame stability. Experimental data and a simple theory for curved, stretched flames could help engineers develop and validate better models. Those models could support cleaner power and heat generation systems that use clean fuels, with fewer harmful emissions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Jeonglae Kim
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering
Build a modeling framework based on wavelet multiresolution analysis, which separates a flow by length scale, to discover subgrid-scale stress models that reproduce spectral energy transfer in large-eddy simulations of turbulent premixed flames.
Bryan Schmidt
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Engineering
Design lattices of phononic subsurfaces, engineered material units placed under a surface, and use stability theory and direct numerical simulations to test whether they suppress turbulence-causing disturbances downstream and from varying directions.
The school
California State University-Northridge: 4 labs on PI Pages, $27M a year on research, 11 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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