Joseph Powers
Professor
Education: Ph.D.University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988; M.S. - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985; B.S. Mechanical Engineering - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983
Research Interests: Combustion, Fluid Mechanics, Thermochemistry, Computational Science, Applied Mathematics
Courses: Mathematical Methods I; Thermodynamics; Intermediate Thermodynamics; Numerical Methods; Viscous Flow; Fluid Mechanics, Fundamentals of Combustion.
Email: powers@nd.edu
Phone: 574.631.5978
Office: 372 Fitzpatrick Hall of Engineering
Website: www.nd.edu/~powers/
Dr. Powers received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983, 1985, and 1988, respectively. His research interests include computational mechanics, scientific computing, detonation theory, pyrotechnic combustion, high speed propulsion, transition to detonation in solid propellants, high speed flows in reactive porous media, numerical and theoretical methods for multiscale phenomena, and systematic reduction of large systems of chemical kinetics. He is the author of several papers in the archival literature and has supervised many M.S. and Ph.D. students since joining the faculty in 1989. He serves Associate Editor for the Journal of Propulsion and Power. He has held summer appointments at NASA Glenn Research Center, the U. S. Air Force Wright Laboratories at Eglin AFB, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of the University of Notre Dame's Amoco-College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 1994, the Department Faculty Award in 1997, and the Spira Award for teaching excellence in 2010. He received a NASA Innovative Technology Award in 1999. Dr. Powers is a member of APS, SIAM, ASME, ASEE, the Combustion Institute, and is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA.
Selected Publications
- Al-Khateeb, A. N., Powers, J. M., and Paolucci, S., 2010, "On the Necessary Grid Resolution for Verified Calculation of Premixed Laminar Flames," Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 304-326.
- Al-Khateeb, A. N., Powers, J. M., Paolucci, S., Sommese, A. J., Diller, J. A., Hauenstein, J. D., and Mengers, J. D., 2009, "One-Dimensional Slow Invariant Manifolds for Spatially Homogeneous Reactive Systems," Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 131, No. 2, 024118.
- Powers, J. M., and Paolucci, S., 2008, "Uniqueness of Chemical Equilibria in Ideal Mixtures of Ideal Gases," American Journal of Physics, Vol. 76, No. 9, pp. 848-855.
- Cochran, M. T., and Powers, J. M., 2008, "Computation of Compaction in Compressible Granular Material," Mechanics Research Communications, Vol. 35, Nos. 1-2, pp. 96-103.
- Powers, J. M., and Frolov, S. M., 2006, "Perspectives on Detonation-Based Propulsion," Journal of Propulsion and Power, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 1153-1154.
- Powers, J. M., 2006, "Review of Multiscale Modeling of Detonation," Journal of Propulsion and Power, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 1217-1229.
- Powers, J. M., and Aslam, T. D., 2006, "Exact Solution for Multidimensional Compressible Reactive Flow for Verifying Numerical Algorithms,'' AIAA Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 337-344.
Research
- Reduced Kinetic Schemes Coupled with Wavelet Collocation Analysis for Combustion Modelling
- Cavitation Suppression in High Performance Fuel Pumps
- High Accuracy Computations for Detonations with Simple and Detailed Chemistry
- Design Optimization for High Mach Number Applications
- Transition to Detonation in Energetic Solids
Graduate Students
- Joshua Mengers
- Christopher Romick
