ACADEMIA

Dr. John Deur has joined Reaction Design as the Model Fuels Consortium (MFC) Program Director. Dr. Deur brings over 20 years of combustion simulation and engineering management experience to this new position. According to Dr. Deur, "I've spent the better part of my career trying to accurately predict the combustion performance and resulting emissions from engine designs. I know how useful the reaction database and mechanism reduction tools being developed by the Consortium will be. I'm therefore very enthusiastic about being a part of this project and look forward to the positive impact it will have on the engine design process in the industry." As a supervisor and researcher at NASA's Glenn Research Center, Dr. Deur was involved in developing, testing, and applying reduced reaction mechanisms for hydrocarbon combustion with an emphasis on emissions prediction. This included extensive work with KIVA, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for reacting flows widely used in the automotive industry. Dr. Deur left Glenn to manage all reacting flow engineering work for adapco, makers of the STAR-CD CFD software. While at adapco, he was heavily involved in developing CFD methodologies for incylinder combustion and exhaust aftertreatment simulation for gasoline and Diesel engines. This included the linkage between STAR-CD and Reaction Design's CHEMKIN software, which Reaction Design has since generalized as KINetics. Dr. Deur has also held senior engineering and supervisory positions at Thiokol Corporation, Columbian Chemicals Corporation, and Pointwise, Inc., with wide-ranging responsibilities in product development, soot research, and customer support. As the MFC Program Director, Dr. Deur will be the principal liaison between the development team at Reaction Design and the member companies of the MFC, ensuring that the software tools created for the MFC meet the members' requirements and expectations. He will also provide technical insights for the Reaction Design team into the needs of CFD developers, practitioners, and customers. The goal of the MFC Consortium is to enable the design of cleaner-burning, more-efficient engines and fuels by accelerating the development of software tools and databases to streamline and bolster these advances. Charter members include: Chevron, Dow Chemical Company, L'Institut Francais du Petrole (IFP), Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan, PSA Peugeot Citroen, and Toyota. Additional member companies are expected to join the consortium over the next two calendar quarters. As Shigeo Furuno, General Manager of the Power Train Engineering Division of Toyota, has remarked, "Simulation is an increasingly important part of engine development to maximize Enviro-Friendly performance, and the work we are doing with Reaction Design will help us advance our capabilities in this area."