Terry Parker, Professor, Ph.D, Engineering Division Director

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Parker is the Engineering Division director and he has held this position since May of 2006. His research interests center around combustion, optical diagnostic measurements for reacting flows, and energy conversion. He is especially well known for his contributions to non-intrusive measurements in high pressure diesel sprays.

Homepage - http://inside.mines.edu/~tparker
Dr. Parker's research interests are centered around the development and application of optical diagnostic methods to high temperature and pressure reacting systems. These techniques can be used to probe a range of exciting physical systems including optically-dense combusting sprays, reacting flows tailored to produce specific materials, and power plant duct flows. His effort in combusting sprays is focused on the production of droplet size and liquid volume fraction information in the dense region near the injector tip. This region is where liquid breakup, evaporation, ignition, and burning occur. Recent efforts by Dr. Parker have expanded this investigation to include ballistic imaging of the near-tip region of diesel sprays. Dr. Parker's effort in flame synthesis systems is currently focused on using scattering diagnostics to monitor agglomeration and surface-growth this information will be used in the production of simplified models for materials synthesis systems. The current focus of this work is to produce quantitative measurements of silica particle diameters and volume fractions as a function of height above the flame for a range of operating conditions. These results will be compared with a collisional growth model. The effort in power plant duct flows is on the production of field-worthy sensors that can be applied near the combustion zone to monitor a range of combustion effluent gases. These sensors will form the basis for control methods developed to control emissions. Sensors developed for this effort have evolved from a custom built Fabry-Perot interferometer for the detection of NO to the use of an Acousto-Optical Tunable Filter for high speed spectral sampling spectra are subsequently processed to determine line-integrated temperature as well as column densities of water and carbon dioxide. All of these systems are of direct relevance to the combustion community and are formidable experimental problems

Current Research
Advanced Measurements in Diesel Sprays