We are pleased to announce that Nawaf Alghamdi is the first graduate student selected for the GPURC grant awarded by King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)!

Congratulations Andrew R. Maloney on winning the Individual Lab Safety Award organized by the Health, Safety and Environment Department (HSE) at KAUST. Andrew, who is the Lab Manager at the CCRC, building 7 labs, has always given utmost importance to safety protocols and certainly deserves this recognition.

Rafig Babayev received The Best Paper Award at the 2019 JSAE/SAE Powertrains, Fuels & Lubricants International Meeting organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan in Kyoto, September 2019. It was awarded for his study on a novel combustion mode, the Isobaric Combustion, which enables internal combustion engines to simultaneously achieve higher efficiency and lower emissions.

Congratulations Dr. Wesley Boyette for winning "The ASPACC Young Investigator Award" at the12th Asia-Pacific Conference on Combustion held in Fukuoka, Japan on July 4, 2019.

CCRC Ph.D. student Bogdan Dragos Ilies recently received two awards from the League of Romanian Students Abroad: a special mention in the category 'Romanian students abroad' and the Public Audience Award.

CCRC's Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Aamir Farooq has been selected as a co-recipient of the 2019 Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award.

CCRC Professor of Mechanical Engineering Hong G. Im was recently elected as a Combustion Institute Fellow for his outstanding contributions to the fundamental understanding of combustion through the amalgamation of theory, numerical methods and high performance computational simulations.

A combustion problem that has troubled engine manufacturers since the industry began still plagues the designers of fuel-efficient engines. A team at KAUST’s Clean Combustion Research Center, led by Robert Dibble, focuses on understanding pre-ignition.

Members from the McLaren Group attended the University's 2019 Winter Enrichment Program, speaking about KAUST and McLaren's ongoing extreme performance research partnership

Plasma technology could help the petrochemical industry transition to an electrified, decarbonized future. The shift to a future marked by carbon-free renewable energy sources is being explored by KAUST researcher Min Suk Cha as societies seek to end our reliance on fire. Cha and his team, including postdoc Ramses Snoeckx are researching electrically generated plasmas as the future of chemical synthesis and manufacturing to replace combustion-driven processes.

CCRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Xiaoyuan Zhang received the 2020 Bernard Lewis Fellowship. Dr. Zhang joined the Combustion and Pyrolysis Chemistry (CPC) Group under the supervision of Prof. Mani Sarathy as a postdoctoral researcher at the beginning of 2020. In 2019, she earned her Ph.D. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Her current research interests are combustion reaction kinetics of fossil fuels and biofuels, and model development for Surrogate and Real Fuels.

A highly selective and sensitive laser sensor can pick up low-level benzene emissions in ambient air. A laser-based sensor developed at KAUST could improve monitoring of benzene emissions and limit exposure to this pollutant. In collaboration with Saudi Aramco, KAUST researchers have developed a device that accurately senses extremely low concentrations of benzene in real time.

Advanced modes of combustion that are controlled by plasma discharges could become key components of the circular carbon economy.

Humans have a very long history with fire and, over the past two centuries, with more controlled forms of combustion. Our evolving mastery of combustion is marked by many technological leaps, but now, the overarching aim of the research field is to find ways to mitigate combustion’s main drawback—the carbon dioxide it generates.

In April, The Combustion Institute (CI) announced KAUST Professors Aamir Farooq and Mani Sarathy received its inaugural Research Excellence Award. Farooq and Sarathy were among a large group of talented international researchers who won the award, and both professors have been CI members for many years.

​The CCRC congratulates Andrew Maloney and Mark Brown on their new positions in the center. Andrew Maloney, who was previously the Center Operations and Safety Manager, is now the Center Operations Manager. He will manage overall center operations, administrative and laboratory staff management, and oversee the financial issues of the center.