Combustion is the most common and efficient method to obtain energy from fossil fuels. Combustion engineering is an academy that deals with the reaction in a system from the perspective of analysis of fluiddynamics and thermodynamics that have been major subjects in mechanical engineering. Although the human history of using combustion phenomena has been longer than hunderds of thousand years, the history of combustion analysis has been less than one hundred years. Our efforts in this area have recently been focused on the development of suitable models that can describe flame characteristics under various internal and surrounding conditions. They have been improved with the help of the progress in computation and optical diagnostic techniques. Nevertheless, our knowledge in this area is limited to some typical conditions such as room temperature, atmostpheric pressure, laminar, stoichiometric, and gas phase.
Thus, our ignorance in this area becomes clearer when we meet many actual combustion phenomena that are extreamly far from the typical combustion conditions explained in some texts, and the combustion theories have not been resolved yet. This is a happy news for a curious researcher. Furthermore, recent industry requires the combustion technology at such extreme conditions in many ways. Based on this background, our laboratory has a long-term technical goal for combustion technologies at extreame conditions, and has a long-term academic goal for developing a general combustion theory.