 I'm really happy to introduce Carson Slabot today, one of our colleagues here at Aeronautics and Astronautics. Carson's been at Purdue for quite a while. He's his PhD here with our colleagues over Mechanical Engineering, then joined Zucca Labs as a senior research engineer. And we brought him on board at Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2015 and obviously was successfully promoted to associate professor. Carson, I'm glad you put your little quote up there on the slide from the laboratory to the engine. When I talk about what the word Carson does, he really does look at combustion issues from fairly fundamental things that are laboratory scale, all the way up to test rigs that are at or very close to actual operating conditions for the kinds of engines that he works on. He does high bandwidth, high fidelity diagnostics for engine combustion. He's done work in conventional combustion devices for both gas turbines and ramjets. He's been doing work lately with some colleagues on rotating detonation engines and looking at some of those additional advanced concepts that might have enabled supersonic and hypersonic air breathing propulsion and even tying into rocket propulsion. In addition to all the work that Carson does at at Zucco, he's quite active teaching in the school. He's taught our undergraduate aerospace propulsion course, both air breathing and rocket propulsion. He's done a great job with our design build test propulsion course. He's also taught collaborating with his colleague in mechanical engineering, basically traded off our distance course in air breathing propulsion. So he's got a good footprint in our teaching endeavors as well. Carson, I'm not sure if you're gonna talk about the Burning Man competition or the Burning Man truck you did, but it's also sort of a neat thing that Carson has done. So with that, let me give Carson the stage so we can get close to back on time and you have time to present. We get time to do questions and answers. So Carson, again, congratulations on your promotion. I'm looking forward to your talk. Thanks a lot, Bill, for the introduction. I'm glad that I get to go first while everyone's expectations are still really low for this. So hopefully this goes well. I'm gonna kind of start from the beginning. This really, for me, began back at a very early age and I'm just very fortunate to be in a position now where I can work in a career that basically is what I would do for fun anyways. So like I said, how did I get here? I was actually kind of born and raised in rural Florida. I had a very close family and a dad that was a bit of a gearhead. And so early on, he recognized that I might also like the same sort of mechanical things he did. And really he channeled my interests into that direction from a very early age. So even from here as a kid, I got into motorsports at actually at 10 years old. I was on a drag strip and racing. Doing, I would say the earliest stages of my data analysis and data acquisition, building those skills even from my school age, built my first car. It had to end up on a drag strip too before it was over. And then even into some higher level racing before I got into my formal education and working on my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. My goal back then was actually just to join a racing team. That's what I really wanted to do. But then through an internship at Lockheed Martin, I realized that I probably wanted to change that goal and that set me on a path towards aerospace engineering and graduate school and so forth. So as Bill mentioned, I came here to Purdue in 2010 for my PhD in mechanical engineering and was able to then join the faculty in 2015. And so that's the focus of the rest of this talk. So the high level overview of what we do in my group is we use high bandwidth optical diagnostics to probe the physics of interaction between fluid mechanics and chemistry which are effectively the rate controlling processes and combustion. We really, for me, like I said, I'm an engineer at heart. I'm interested in a lot of complex engineering problems particularly in propulsion. I really just like things that go fast as you can kind of see that that was sort of raised and brought into me from a very early age. And so whether it's a gas turbine or a rocket engine or a ramjet or a scramjet or anything else, we pretty much take this same approach to the problem. We will build an experiment in our laboratory which suitably replicates the flow conditions in a gas turbine or a rocket. We shoot lasers at that flame through windows or even just in the plume. And then from the interaction of that light with a matter that is within the flow, we can measure things that we need to know like temperature or pressure or velocity or what chemical species are there. And then that's where the math comes in. Once we have those signals or images or whatever it is, we analyze that and we learn things about where fuel, for example, is going within the combustor at different throttle positions or how different processes interact within combustors like having large-scale turbulent structures which are sensitive to acoustics and other noise generated within the combustor and how that can impact the flame and drive instabilities and so forth. This is an example in the top right of one of these things where we have made measurements at high enough rates so that we can actually volumetrically reconstruct the large-scale flow structures within a gas turbine flame at operating conditions which are representative of when that burner is keeping you up in the air on your plane. All this is enabled by Zucor laboratories. It starts and I would say it starts and ends but really it continues at this point, thankfully, because I got tenure so it doesn't end yet. It starts and continues with Zucor laboratories. This is sort of my home away from home in the sense that I've been working out here for many years and it's a very special place for me. When I started as a graduate student actually, I took this picture of this Purdue Propulsion, I was very proud to be at Purdue. And so I thought it was actually quite fitting that I was building this talk up. I actually had another picture of that same logo which was taken about two months after I started as a professor here. And this was actually the rest of the office space that I was sitting in. I had the, I would say fortunate, but also fortunate now because it worked out but it was a pretty stressful experience at the time of having a building be built from my laboratory from the ground up. The announcement that Zucor Labs was going to undergo a tremendous expansion to house our growing faculty and growing research in the area of propulsion. That was actually made the day before I interviewed to become a faculty member here. And so I viewed that as a $10 million plus up to my startup package and was very excited to participate in the design of that building and see it come to fruition. Of course, the challenge is on the first day of being a faculty member, this is your lab. It's a hole in the ground. So we literally got to see it be built through time. Of course, things started looking a little bit more optimistic as walls were constructed. Our laser lab didn't start with the great HVAC controls that we were promised but eventually it got a roof and things like that. And we became more suitable for what we were trying to do. And so about 18 months towards my penultimate year, that's my nervous face smiling that, okay, I got the, we have a lab now. And we have to build the rest of this and make things happen. And so my group here and I, we started with effectively bear concrete floors and toolboxes and got to work. And now it's all, you know, sunsets and beautiful but it was a long road in between then. So I've just got a few minutes. I'll try to be quick through some of the, I guess a broad coverage of some of the problems that we work on. One of the big things that actually started working on when I first became a faculty member, actually even as a graduate student here was looking at gas turbine combustion. We built this experiment and it was able to actually replicate the flow conditions for the sponsor we were looking at to be able to study their burner and see what happens inside and try to diagnose some problems they were having with fuel air mixing and help them achieve higher efficiencies. And so we run a combustor like this. This is exactly what hangs on the wing of your aircraft engine. That injector was directly extracted from an engine and then given to us to run. We ignite it with a laser. That's what the spark is. You're seeing here a relatively low speed video in reality when we actually run much more expensive cameras at much higher repetition rates. We can see that when we really zoom in on what's happening, this is a very complex flame. It has large and small scale structures interacting across a wide range of scales in space and time. And this is fundamentally what controls things like the rate of pollutant emissions from the flame and so forth. And so as we try to understand these things better, the laser diagnostics which we perform give us the critical insight needed to effectively understand what's happening in these complex flows and then understand how to better optimize them. A major issue in the development of propulsion systems is thermoacoustic instabilities. We can look at these different modes of instability, longitudinal as well as transverse and other sorts of modes. This is the same flame under different operating conditions. It has totally different modes of instability. These are things which we study and try to model mathematically so that we can have better tools for a design process to avoid these sorts of issues. But on one side of our work we're trying to reduce the amplitude of instabilities in flames. The other, I guess, way to handle this is just to embrace the instability and amplify it as much as you possibly can. That's effectively the basis of this new technology called rotating detonation engines for pressure gain combustion. This is an area of a very active interest right now. RDS were theorized many years ago to offer potential benefits from a thermodynamic perspective and from a power density perspective. But it took the Russians actually firing one in the early 2000s for the US to really start funding these things heavily. So that's, I guess, a nugget of wisdom for other folks that are looking at an area to go into for research. So we're really working on that a lot. We're also working for high speed propulsion applications looking at solid fuel RAM jets. Here I am running out of time. So I'll just kind of leave it to say that this is a very active, very of interest for us right now in working with O&R as well as other DOD agencies to better understand how to make these devices perform better. I wanted to take the time to also just point out at least from a teaching standpoint, one of my favorite classes to teach. It's Arrow 535 Propulsion Design Build Test. We have a lot of fun in this class and it's an experiential learning opportunity for graduate students and also high achieving undergraduates to in one semester design, build and test a combustion device at Zucro Laboratories. And so here are a couple of examples where we've actually built a rotating detonation engine fueled by a solid and as Bill alluded to before we even take on some just some for fun projects like this 100 foot tall flamethrower for Burning Man shown here on the literal fire truck that it was that we used for Burning Man. So looking forward, we'll be continuing to work in this sort of framework from the laboratory to the engine and also working for graduate student mentoring and development and hands-on learning opportunities for education. Finally, I just have one more thing to say and then I'll stop, I promise, is that Zucro Labs is a very special place. We all certainly emphasize the fact that we have tremendous resources and capabilities there to do awesome propulsion research. But actually what would make Zucro Labs work is the people, if we had all these labs and so forth but without people like Scott Meyer and the other folks listed up here, we wouldn't be able to really have the success that we have. And so I just wanted to acknowledge very specifically that Scott Meyer has just had a tremendous influence on me and I've learned more about engineering from Scott than anybody else. And so I'm really thankful for that. It's why I'm here. Rohan Gejji is my right-hand man and obviously Steve Easter and Bob Luck who just had a tremendous influence on me as well. So anyways, with that I'll stop, I promise. And we'll quit from here. Thank you. Thanks, Carson. And congratulations again on the promotion. So I'm supposed to monitor any question and I see any question to answer a little bit. So if you have a question on your remote, you can certainly type it into the chat but Carson, I'm a little bit hamstrung. So if somebody there has a question, please feel free to go ahead and call on somebody in the room and address a question directly that way. Sure. So any work, I think you mentioned the Department of Energy and interest in ammonia. Yeah. So is that an area of exploration for you? Sure. Yeah, we were fortunate to just have a big win also with my co-PI Bob Luck to look at ammonia combustion as a, really to solve some of the logistical issues for providing hydrogen at large scale to combustion devices for energy applications. Hydrogen is a very popular fuel right now because of course, as we try to go towards carbon reduction in our combustion emissions, hydrogen is one way to do that. Problem is that hydrogen is very difficult to transport in large masses and distribute through a large network. And so ammonia looks like an attractive way to do that. Yeah. There are other good reasons to do it. And of course, as you know, it was the fuel used on the X-15. So it's actually a pretty good rocket fuel as well. So now that we're getting over the hump of working with ammonia in our lab, we're excited about other potential opportunities that we can leverage there. Of course, I don't see any online, but let me ask you, and can you actually, can you mention really quickly about the Hypulse because you were really instrumental in getting us to bring that device to Purdue? Yeah. Hypulse is, I guess I'll just give a quick overview. Hypulse is a reflected shock tunnel or it can also operate in a shock expansion tunnel mode. It's gonna be a really great capability for us to look at both aerodynamics and propulsion, propulsion topics, I guess, under extreme Mach number conditions. The tunnel has been operated up to Mach 17 and can go much higher than that. We're excited to have that. That actually was the facility that was utilized in the development of the X-43, one of the most famous and productive hypersonic flight tests experiments that we've run in this country. And so we're eager to bring that here and take advantage of it, particularly with all the new diagnostics that we can bring to bear on this problem, which weren't available back in those days. All right, Carson, I think just to keep on time, I'm gonna have to cut things off there. As we wrap up, you don't have to answer it, but somebody asks if you get a hundred foot flames over to football game. So just think about that as we go forward. Hey, once again, congratulations, Carson, to you. And then to the other associate professors, I have to leave, but congratulations to all of you. It's great to have you as colleagues here at Purdue. So thank you, Carson. Yeah, thanks so much, Bill.