Forman A. Williams

Forman A. Williams received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1955 and obtained his PhD at California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Sol Penner in 1958, with Richard Feynman on the thesis committee. He presented his PhD thesis to then 80 year old von Kármán at his home, who had influenced Williams greatly.

After finishing his PhD, he worked in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard University until 1964, after which he joined the faculty at UCSD. He was the fourth faculty member to be appointed, when Sol Penner founded the Engineering department in University of California, San Diego. In January 1981, he accepted the Robert H. Goddard chair at Princeton, eventually returning to UCSD in 1988. Williams also served as an adjunct Professor at Yale University for one month of each year starting in 1997 and culminating after ten years. He was also the director of Center for Energy research from 1991 to 2006 at UCSD. He served as a department chair at UCSD for four years.

His research interests includes combustion, propulsion applications, micro-gravity flames etc. He made seminal contributions to the combustion field for the past six decades and considered as one of the prominent scientist in combustion. He wrote the Williams spray equation in 1958 when he was still a PhD student, as a statistical model for spray combustion analogous to Boltzmann equation. Though Activation Energy Asymptotics were known to Russian scientists forty years ago, it was Williams call in 1971 in Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics which made the western scientific community to start using the analysis. He wrote down the G equation in 1985, a model for premixed turbulent flame as a wrinkled flame.

He worked on number of projects with NASA, Air force and other organizations, for example, he is part of the ISS mission on FLEX (Flame Extinguishment Experiment) and FLEX-2. He is an experimentalist, a theoretical physicist, a combustion chemist and an applied mathematician. He conducted lot of experiments, some of his recent experiments include spiral flames in von Kármán swirling flow, ethanol flames etc.

Williams Combustion Theory, which is widely used as a reference book and recommended for graduate students in the field of combustion.

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Lecture Notes

Williams is an elected member of National Academy of Engineering and also in American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds an honorary doctorate degree from Technical University of Madrid. He is also a member of AIAA, Combustion Institute etc. He is been in the editorial board of various journals, currently he is in the editorial board of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, Combustion Science and Technology. Some of his awards include:

• Bernard Lewis Gold Medal (1990) from Combustion Institute
• Alexander von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award
• Pendray Aerospace Literature Award (1993) and Propellants & Combustion Award (2004) from AIAA