Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman kicked off the department’s longest running student-teacher research grant program, the University Coal Research (UCR) program.

More than $US550,000 will be available to fund two projects, with a maximum of just over $275,000 per project. Each project will involve one or two colleges or universities and will extend over 36 months.

Research will be conducted under the broad topic of “enabling advanced modelling and simulation for fuel-flexible combustors”. Research examples include:

Quantifying current prediction capability for flashback and lean blowout and identifying the sensitivity to physical sub-models;

Conducting numeric investigations of boundary condition effects on computational fluid dynamic simulations of thermo-acoustic instabilities; and

Evaluating the role of transport parameters in model prediction accuracy.