Travel: Support for student travel to the Combustion Institute 40th International Symposium Emphasizing Energy Transition, Milan, Italy, July 22 - 26, 2024

The 2024 International Symposium on Combustion will be held in July 2024. It is a gathering of combustion researchers from academia, industry, and government, both from the United States and around the world. The conference's technical program consists of a series of plenary lectures, contributed oral presentations, poster sessions and social gatherings. The best work presented is published in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute. This award will provide funding for students to attend the symposium, where they will have a unique opportunity to meet members of the research community, discuss their research, and exchange ideas with both senior researchers as well as their student peers from around the world. Moreover, several panel discussions on Industry Perspectives will be held and one of the topical review presentations will be followed by a panel discussion that includes experts from academia and industry. Combustion is ubiquitous in traditional energy conversion systems such as automotive engines, stationary, and aircraft gas turbines, rocket and space propulsion, electrical power generation, industrial furnaces, and home and institutional space heating. This year there will be special emphasis on transition to renewable fuels such as hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), etc. produced via clean renewable energy and CO2 sequestration. Moreover, emerging technology areas such as hypersonic propulsion, microscale power generation and material synthesis depend critically on chemically reacting flow processes. The world’s dependence on combustion processes has led to many technological challenges including air quality, energy efficiency, and fire/explosion safety. Thus, combustion is still an active, vital area of research. The community of researchers shares knowledge in this important area through the symposium. Student travel support will engage the next generation of combustion researchers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.