Williams / Oppenheim / Olfe Modern Developments in Energy, Combustion and Spectroscopy

In Honor of S. S. Penner
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4832-8779-9
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 201 Seiten

This compendium of technical articles is dedicated to Professor Stanford Solomon Penner on the occasion of his 70th birthday. As one of the most prominent scientists of our times, he has been particularly instrumental in advancing the field of combustion science while simultaneously he has developed quantitative spectroscopy into an important engineering discipline, and is also a leading international expert on energy issues. Written primarily by researchers who were Professor Penner's doctorate students during the last four decades, the articles consist of original contributions as well as previously published papers that provide important insights into combustion, spectroscopy, and energy problems. Among the topics included are turbulent combustion, flame structure, detonations, spectroscopic diagnostics, spectroscopy of atmospheric gases, and physical problems associated with nuclear reactors as well as electric power distribution, and energy conversion. The book includes a short biography of Professor Penner and a complete bibliography of his publications.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williams, F. A.

Oppenheim, A. K.

Olfe, D. B.

Lapp, M.

Leseproben

A Biography of S. S. Penner

Stanford (Sol) Penner was born in Unna, Germany, on July 5, 1921. He came to the United States in 1936 and graduated from the Saratoga Springs High School in upstate New York in 1938. Penner obtained a BS in Chemistry from Union College in 1942, an MS in physical chemistry in 1943 and the PhD in 1946, both from the University of Wisconsin. His academic performance was a monotonous A in every subject, including the many English literature courses he chose as a minor at Union and the many physics and mathematics courses he took at Wisconsin.

Young Sol Penner’s first ambition was that of becoming an artist. There were probably good reasons for dropping this idea, one of which should be apparent from a (pastel) self-portrait which he drew in color at the age of nine*. There were equivalent reasons for dropping later his intention to be a poet.

Penner appeared at Wisconsin in July of 1942 with a Collins Fellowship from the General Electric Company to work with Farrington Daniels, the well-known physical chemist. His first activities as a graduate student involved theoretical calculations and plumbing repairs on Daniels' thermal nitrogen-fixation process. The most demanding part of this job was racing many flights of stairs to the top of Bascomb Hall in Madison behind the 60-year old Daniels. Because of war requirements, he soon became involved in solid-propellant research, both experimental formulations and theoretical analysis, as a research fellow on defense-related investigations. What is probably the very first U.S. paper of a model for the burning of double-base propellants [“An Hypothesis for Propellant Burning” by R. E. Wilfong, S. S. Penner, and F. Daniels, . 54, 863–872 (1950)] dates from the studies performed during the period 1942–43 and was largely responsible for his preoccupation with propulsion and combustion research for nearly twenty years.

During January of 1944, Daniels advised Penner that he would have to interrupt his graduate studies and work full time either at Argonne National Laboratory (on a then not well identified program of great importance to the war effort) or at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL) on rocket research, assuming that the draft deferrals for otherwise 1A-classified scientists would be continued. Perhaps because too little information was conveyed by his advisor about the nature of the nuclear bomb project, Penner ended up at ABL, in charge of a rocket test-firing range and also deeply involved in research on darkening of solid rocket fuels to overcome the vexing problem of “wormholing,” which was well recognized as responsible for rocket failures, including fatal accidents involving rocket-fired grenades that had been delivered to U.S. troops in North Africa. These propellant and radiation transfer studies were published shortly after the end to the war in . and and provided the long-lasting impetus for Penner’s research on applied spectroscopy and gas emissivities, which extended over four decades. With the end of the war, Penner returned to Madison and was awarded the PhD in January 1946, after being in residence as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin for less than two years.

The first post-PhD appointment he received was as a Research Associate at the Esso Research Laboratories in Linden, NJ, where he spent most of 1946 working on protective oil formulations and ship-board corrosion. Although he very much enjoyed the congenial and stimulating environment at Esso, Penner decided to return to his first research interest and joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a Senior Research Engineer in January of 1947. He remained at JPL until 1950, when he was appointed Assistant Professor of Jet Propulsion (1950–53) and then advanced to Associate Professor (1953–57) and Professor (1957–63) at Caltech. By the time Penner left Caltech in 1962 on leave of absence, he and his students had published nearly 145 papers on combustion, radiation, and spectroscopy.

The W3P (Wilson-Wells and Penner-Weber) method for measuring absolute intensities and line widths of molecular gases was invented at JPL in 1949, although the first publication did not appear until 1951. Penner’s work on the theoretical calculation of gas emissivities from first principles was also begun in 1949, with numerous papers appearing culminating in the 1959 publication of the widely cited book Related research continued for three more decades and included publication of the book (jointly with D. B. Olfe), as well as numerous publications on shock-tube spectroscopy (with K. G. P. Sulzmann and students) and advanced diagnostics. These investigations were equally divided between theoretical and experimental studies and included early collaboration with the Director of the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Group at Caltech, H. S. Tsien (during 1951 and 1952), as well as with numerous post-doctoral fellows and graduate students (including in roughly chronological order, D. Weber, S. Weinbaum, M. Gilbert, M. H. Ostrander, R. J. Holm, B. H. Elliott, R. W. Kavanagh, E. K. Bjornerud, P. J. Dyne, H. Aroeste, W. J. Hooker, M. Lapp, F. Harshbarger, A. Thomson, D. B. Olfe, L. D. Gray, E. N. Bennet, A. Guttman, R. W. Patch (R. Walker), W. L. Shackleford, M. Thomas, R. Goldstein, P. Varanasi, O. P. Sharma, A. Boni, F. Bien, L. A. Kennedy, L. Liebowitz, R. C. Sepucha, J. E. Lowder, W. Davidor, M. L. Price, T. Jerskey, H. K. Chen (Law), J. M. Bernard, G. E. Parks, P. H. P. Chang, J. M. Kline, W. M. Heffington, C. P. Wang, and others). Penner became Founder-Editor of (JQSRT) in 1960 and has continued to serve as Editor of this publication to this date; in 1986, an International Symposium on Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer was organized by M. Lapp and P. Varanasi in honor of Penner’s 65th birthday, and the papers presented at this Symposium were published as a special issue of in 1988.

The combustion research he carried out involved at first a remarkable collaboration (1952–54) with Th. von Kármán and G. Millán on laminar flame theory extending from then on over many decades of joint studies with many university and industrial associates (S. Sherman, D. Altman, R. C. Whiteman, P. P. Datner, R. Schultz, L. Green, Jr., W. Nachbar, G. S. Gill, E. F. Eckel, L. L. Bixon, R. Kushida, G. Adomeit, J. L. Lauer, T. Li, and others) and graduate students (M. Goldsmith, J. F. Rex, A. E. Fuhs, T. H. Crowe, F. A. Williams, T. A. Jacobs, R. Reichenbach, D. Squires, J. Porter, S. S. McElmury, M. Y. Bahadori, C. P. Li, D. F. Wiesenhahn, and M. B. Richards). The papers resulting from this remarkable paper include the pioneering develoments on relaxation processes during nozzle expansion, one of the first quantitative analyses of single-droplet burning, the first experimental studies on droplet arrays burning in close proximity, numerous studies on combustion in solid- and liquid-propellant rockets, as well as the first exhaustive identification of dimensionless groups in chemical reactors with flow and application of the results to rocket-engine scaling. More recently, the emphasis has been on municipal waste incineration and the associated formation and destruction mechanisms for highly toxic substances and on combustion mechanisms involved in nuclear reactor-grade graphite. Early publications included the book (1957) and the monographs (1955) and (1962); also, jointly with B. P. Mullins, (1959) and, jointly with D. Altman, J. M. Carter and M. Summerfield, (1960). An invited Chemical and Engineering News feature article appeared in 1963 on “Combustion and Propulsion Research.”

He always assigned first priority to his responsibilities as a classroom teacher and prepared every lecture with meticulous care. As a result, his teaching assignments, which were usually light (not more than two quarter courses per year), were nevertheless very time consuming for him. These courses were generally also difficult and time consuming for the students. A memorial of student reaction was provided by cartoons presented to Penner in 1955 by the Caltech class that had to suffer through the final corrections of the galley proofs for

Following a sabbatical year (1971–72) as a Guggenheim fellow, Penner became interested in energy-related studies and has spent most of the last 20 years on active research in this vital field. While the number of PhD students trained in energy research has been relatively small (L. Icerman and M. R. Brambley), there have been very extensive collaborations with senior industry, government and university scientists. Penner has served as Founder and Editor-in-Chief of since 1975 and is the senior author of a three-volume series on (1974, 76, 81) and (1975, 77, 84), both written by S. S. Penner and L. Icerman;...