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Photo courtesy of Ms. Tunde Gaspar of KAUST's Clean Combustion Research Center (CCRC)

KAUST's Clean Combustion Research Center (CCRC) is one of the pioneer research facilities for combustion and fuel research. Here at the University, the ongoing endeavors address prime aspects of combustion quality in gas turbine, automotive engines and other industrial devices. The efforts are bidirectional: enhancing existing combustion technologies and simultaneously devising novel solutions for utilizing fuels in cleaner and efficient ways. 

Innovations are an everyday affair in the CCRC. Novel experiments and ingenious computational tools are continually evolved in order to study flame and fuel characteristics. These ultimately complement to global efforts of energy saving and environment conservation.

Cloudflame is one such prodigious vehicle that carries CCRC's advances to the entire community. It is a platform where cutting-edge computational tools are rendered accessible to the research world via the World Wide Web. Efforts are underway to further its utility through large-scale digitization of scientific data.

The Cloudflame database is comprised of relevant scientific records published over a large span of time, which helps researchers compare their findings against eminent scholars with great ease. Cloudflame equips the user with an array of tools which perform diverse and intricate computations, including flame speed calculations and ignition delay simulation. These computations yield data indispensable to engine designers for analyzing flame and ignition behavior of engine/fuel system.

On a similar note, various software like Fuel Design Tool are in the process of being deployed on the Cloudflame portal. These tools aim to enable users in formulating fuel mixtures with desired properties that are suitable to specific combustion settings.

Such powerful tools and the constantly expanding database come in handy while traveling or working from remote locations; the only prerequisite is a decent Internet connection. One of many remarkable features is that once the computation has been completed, determined results can be emailed to the requestor in a presentable format.

As the list of merits goes on, the Cloudflame database has commendably become a potential meeting point for global collaborations and is witnessing a swelling number of submitted requests with each passing day. 

- By Ahfaz Ahmed, KAUST Ph.D. student

Click here to read this news item on KAUST Discovery where it was originally published.