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"With the addition of these world-class companies, the MFC is solidifying its role as a vital resource in the automotive and fuel industries' development and design process," said Bernie Rosenthal, CEO of Reaction Design. "The MFC's success is directly related to the quality of its members, and I expect to see revolutionary solutions grow out of this group." Engine manufacturers worldwide are under regulatory and economic pressures to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards and demanding fuel efficiency requirements. These pressures are aided by fuel producers who must consider an ever-widening product range. These challenges have also introduced new engine technologies that must be mastered. Testing and empirical approaches are expensive and increasingly inadequate in addressing all of these design options and tradeoffs. The result is increasing reliance on the use of simulation in engine and fuel development. Model fuels — computer representations of the chemical components found in fuels — are ideal for use in simulation because they consist of simplified "surrogate" chemical compounds that accurately represent the sometimes thousands of unique chemical compounds that comprise the actual fuel. To use model fuels effectively in simulation, it is necessary to validate the chemical descriptions of these surrogate compounds; this is the main focus of the work of the consortium. According to Donald Stanton, director of advanced engine development of Cummins Engine Company, "Simulation plays a key role in our engine development strategy. Having access to the Model Fuels Consortium will enhance our ability to design cleaner and more efficient diesels through the kinetics and software tools that the MFC provides. We're excited to be a part of a large group focused on many of the important issues for Cummins." "We need to be able to make accurate predictions of emissions and the general combustion process. We looked at what the MFC is doing and believe that our membership will help us achieve this," said George Davis, manager of the Powertrain Research Laboratory at Ford Motor Company. "The MFC is unique in that it allows engine design and fuel development companies to work together to tackle the challenges that reach across both industries," said Yoshio Maeda, Chief Engineer of Honda R&D. "We look forward to finding cost-effective solutions that enhance our future engine designs and benefit consumers worldwide." "As a company well known for engineering innovation and openness to new and worthwhile technology, we at Mazda, welcome the opportunity to participate in Reaction Design's consortium. We expect that the surrogate methodology that the consortium is developing will further strengthen our engineering innovation capabilities to meet the engine performance goals along with the more stringent emissions requirements that we face going forward," said Tsutomu Matsuoka, general manager of the Technical Research Center of Mazda. About Reaction Design Reaction Design helps transportation manufacturers and energy companies rapidly achieve their Clean Technology goals by automating the analysis of chemical processes via simulation and modeling solutions. Reaction Design is the exclusive developer and distributor of CHEMKIN, the de facto standard for modeling gas-phase and surface chemistry that provides engineers ultra-fast access to reliable answers that save time and money in the development process. Reaction Design also offers the CHEMKIN-CFD software package, which brings detailed kinetics modeling to other engineering applications, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) programs. Reaction Design's world-class engineers, chemists and programmers have expertise that spans multi-scale engineering from the molecule to the plant. Reaction Design serves more than 350 customers in the commercial, government and academic markets. Reaction Design can be found online at www.reactiondesign.com.
CHEMKIN® and Reaction Design® are registered trademarks of Reaction Design. CHEMKIN-CFD and Model Fuels Consortium are trademarks of Reaction Design. |