Forman A. Williams
| Forman A. Williams | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
January 12, 1934 New Brunswick, New Jersey |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields |
Fluid dynamics Combustion Aerospace Engineering |
| Institutions |
Harvard University University of California, San Diego Princeton University Yale University |
| Alma mater |
Princeton University California Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | Theoretical Studies In Heterogeneous Combustion (1958) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stanford S. Penner |
| Doctoral students | Chung K. Law Carlos Fernández-Pello Kalyanasundaram Seshadri Antonio L. Sánchez Siavash Sohrab Harsha Chelliah Javier Urzay Michael J. Gollner |
| Known for | Activation Energy Asymptotics G equation Williams spray equation San Diego Mechanism Clavin-Williams equation |
| Influences | Theodore von Kármán |
Forman Arthur Williams (born January 12, 1934) is an Emeritus Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, a renowned Professor in the field of Combustion and Aerospace Engineering.
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 turbulent flame front as a wrinkled laminar flames, similar to Darrieus–Landau instability. This is a widely used model in Turbulent Combustion.
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