Combustion Engineering

Combustion Engineering, Second Edition maintains the same goal as the original: to present the fundamentals of combustion science with application to today’s energy challenges. Using combustion applications to reinforce the fundamentals of combustion science, this text provides a uniquely accessible introduction to combustion for undergraduate students, first-year graduate students, and professionals in the workplace.

Combustion is a critical issue impacting energy utilization, sustainability, and climate change. The challenge is to design safe and efficient combustion systems for many types of fuels in a way that protects the environment and enables sustainable lifestyles. Emphasizing the use of combustion fundamentals in the engineering and design of combustion systems, this text provides detailed coverage of gaseous, liquid and solid fuel combustion, including focused coverage of biomass combustion, which will be invaluable to new entrants to the field.

Eight chapters address the fundamentals of combustion, including fuels, thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, flames, detonations, sprays, and solid fuel combustion mechanisms. Eight additional chapters apply these fundamentals to furnaces, spark ignition and diesel engines, gas turbines, and suspension burning, fixed bed combustion, and fluidized bed combustion of solid fuels.

Presenting a renewed emphasis on fundamentals and updated applications to illustrate the latest trends relevant to combustion engineering, the authors provide a number of pedagogic features, including:

• Numerous tables with practical data and formulae that link combustion fundamentals to engineering practice
• Concise presentation of mathematical methods with qualitative descriptions of their use
• Coverage of alternative and renewable fuel topics throughout the text
• Extensive example problems, chapter-end problems, and references

These features and the overall fundamentals-to-practice nature of this book make it an ideal resource for undergraduate, first level graduate, or professional training classes. Students and practitioners will find that it is an excellent introduction to meeting the crucial challenge of engineering sustainable combustion systems in a cost-effective manner.

A solutions manual and additional teaching resources are available with qualifying course adoption.

Dr. Kenneth Ragland is an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Throughout his career, he taught courses in thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, combustion, and air pollution control. His early research was on solid fuel ram jet combustion, and gaseous and heterogeneous detonations. His research at UW–Madison focused on solid fuel combustion of coal and biomass as single particles, combustion in shallow and deep fixed beds, fluidized bed combustion, and combustion emissions. He served as chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from July 1995 until his retirement in July 1999. In retirement his research has focused on the development of systems for planting, harvesting, and combusting biomass crops for energy. Currently, he is the vice president of Energy Performance Systems, Inc.

Dr. Kenneth "Mark" Bryden joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Iowa State University in 1998 after receiving his doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Prior to his studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he worked fourteen years in a wide range of engineering positions at Westinghouse Electric Corporation. This included eight years in power plant operations and six years in power plant engineering. More than ten of these years were spent in engineering management. Mark has an active research and teaching program in the areas of energy, combustion, and appropriate technology. He is particularly interested in biomass combustion and small cookstoves for the developing world. He is president of Engineers for Technical and Humanitarian Opportunities for Service (ETHOS) and is the program director for the Simulation, Modeling and Decision Science Program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. He teaches classes in combustion, sustainability, energy systems, and design for the developing world. He is the recipient of numerous teaching and research awards, including three R&D 100 awards within the past five years.