Friday, March 19, 2004
1:30pm Ð 2:30pm
Professor Paul Blumberg
Abstract:
Many of the greatest technological inventions occurred in advance of the full basic science and analytical understandings that underlie their operation. To a large degree, the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is a case in point. There were also many physics-based computational simulations for design and performance optimization that were developed for important devices and systems before the terminology of Computer-Aided Engineering came into existence.
Early air quality legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, formalized as emission standards for new motor vehicles in the Clean Air Act of 1970, spurred a tidal wave of public and private research and development aimed at understanding, in detail, the origins of air pollutants emanating from vehicular ICE operation. A great deal of the emission control technologies in place today, including many notable inventions, stem from this activity in a remarkably linear way.
This seminar, retrospective in nature, will outline in detail some of the fundamental engineering science and early analytical work that provided a formalized understanding for the development of practical emission control technology. The emphasis will be on 1) the reduction of NOx, i.e., oxides of nitrogen, using both in-cylinder control techniques and exhaust aftertreatment; and 2) the systematic development of engine control strategy to exploit the power of electronic engine control, which became feasible and whose introduction into production was accelerated in this same time period.
Although many excellent scientists and engineers were involved in this work, in this seminar Dr. Blumberg will reference primarily his own work and that of a number of colleagues at Ford Motor Company to illustrate the depth and extent of the development that took place.