Newsletter 2001-1 - Combustion Institute British Section

Symposium the meetings have alternated between North America and “the rest of the
world”.
Programmes
As is commonly the case, the earliest experiences tend to be the most memorable, but
my initial involvement really did coincide with some milestones. Air pollution hit the streets
- as it were - and we were exposed to the seminal work of Starkman and Newhall on
emissions from spark ignition engines, from which emerged the classic diagram relating
emissions to the fuel / air mixture. “Prompt NO” was identified by Fenimore at the
Thirteenth Symposium. Later highlights also come instantly to mind though. I recall being
mesmerised by Bronfin’s invited talk on continuous chemical lasers at the 15th
Symposium in Tokyo. Save for anemometry and ignition, prior to that any discussion
involving lasers had been concerned with their mode of operation. By the Eighteenth
Symposium (1980), the session introduced at preceding meetings as “Measurement
Techniques” had become more fashionable as “Combustion Diagnostics”, and lasers
were “de rigueur” (see Eckbreth, “Recent advances in ...“ Proc. Comb. Inst. 18: 1471 -
1477 (1981)). Detailed kinetic modelling by numerical methods made appearances quite
early on (