Combustion emissions produced from burning real transportation fuels have many environmental impacts. However, detailed chemistry across multiple phases, time scales, and thermodynamic conditions make predicting combustion emissions challenging. Detailed modeling of the gas phase alone is prohibitively expensive, due to the large size and stiffness of the kinetic models. The...
Currently, little work has been performed studying energy consumption in hop kilning. This thesis explores drying with an alternative drying schedule that extends the initially elevated drying temperature currently used by growers and examines its impact on drying time and energy use. Extending the time of the initially elevated drying...
Hydrological and biogeochemical processes occurring throughout a watershed are typically reflected in stream water chemistry, including in coastal watersheds. While Oregon Coast Range streams have been studied in the past, there is a dearth of knowledge in terms of seasonal temporal trends and spatial variability that this study seeks to...
The South Pole ice core (SPC14), drilled in the field seasons of 2014/2015 and 2015/2016, is an intermediate length, 1,751-m ice core which preserves a 54,000-year record of past climate and atmospheric composition. The SPC14 ice core adds to the spatial grid of ice cores in Antarctica extending into the...
The overall goal of this study was to utilize apple pomace, the byproduct from juice processing, as a renewable source of fiber to create sustainable packaging using molded pulp technology. The goal was accomplished through two studies: 1) to modify apple pomace fibers for increasing relative cellulose composition and improving...
As carbon emissions are negatively impacting ecosystems across the globe, researchers are in a race against time to provide cleaner and more eÿcient power. Detonation engines can help meet the increasing demands for cleaner and more eÿcient power generation by providing an alternative means to use oxy-fuel combustion for carbon...
Accurately predicting key combustion phenomena in reactive-flow simulations, e.g., lean blow-out, extinction/ignition limits and pollutant formation, necessitates the use of detailed chemical kinetics. The large size and high levels of numerical stiffness typically present in chemical kinetic models relevant to transportation/power-generation applications make the efficient evaluation/factorization of the chemical kinetic...
Simulations of combustion and reacting flows often encounter stiffness in the equations governing chemical kinetics. Explicit solvers for these ordinary differential equations offer low computational expense, but typically cannot efficiently handle stiff systems. In contrast, implicit methods demand greater expense but offer unconditional stability—as a result, most reactive-flow solvers rely...
Methane is a product of biogeochemical processes which respond to changes in climate. The history of atmospheric methane is recorded by ice cores providing insight into past changes in these biogeochemical processes. This dissertation is comprised of three studies which focus on centennial- and millenial-scale variability of methane from ice...
In this work we consider the dependence of solutions to a partial differential equations system on its data. The problem of interest is a coupled model of nonlinear flow and transport in porous media, with applications, e.g. to environmental modeling. The model of flow we consider is known as the...