The Advanced Combustion and Renewable Fuels (ACRF) team members are listed below.

Professor Benjamin Lawler

Ben Lawler joined the Automotive Engineering department at Clemson University as an Associate Professor in August of 2019 when he moved his group (formerly the Engine Combustion Research Group) to Clemson from Stony Brook University, where he was an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering since January of 2015. Prior, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) from 2013 to 2014. He received his doctoral and master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

His research interests are centered on improving the carbon-neutrality of transportation by investigating strategies that increase the efficiency and reduce pollutant emissions from internal combustion engines, including researching, and advocating for, renewable/sustainable fuels such as the alcohol fuels (methanol, ethanol, etc.).

email: bjlawle@clemson.edu

office: 345 CGEC, 864-283-7224

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YMsTJdkAAAAJ&hl=en

Professor Brian Gainey

Brian Gainey is a Research Assistant Professor in the ACRF lab. He received his PhD in Automotive Engineering from Clemson University in 2020. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stony Brook University in Mechanical Engineering. From 2021 to 2022, he was a postdoc in the ACRF. He is an expert at alcohol combustion, experimental engine testing including instrumentation and LabView coding for data acquisition, and reduced-order engine and thermodynamic modeling. He has first-hand experience operating research engines in spark ignition, conventional diesel combustion, HCCI, RCCI, PFS, TSCI, and GCI, and he has tested a wide variety of fuels including the conventional fuels, natural gas, ethanol, methanol, propanol, butanol, blends of alcohols, and some gaseous fuels mixtures (e.g., syngas). He is a strong proponent of the alcohol fuels and has developed novel combustion strategies for combusting alcohols in compression ignition to maximize efficiency and minimize pollutant emissions.

email: bgaine2@g.clemson.edu

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VdHHjDYAAAAJ&hl=en

Ankur Bhatt

Ankur Bhatt is an experimentalist working in the Advanced Powertrain (APT) test cell as a PhD student. His primary focus is instrumenting and testing the Achates Power 3-cylinder A48 engine as part of a Department of Energy (DOE) funded project designed to develop a family of opposed-piston engines and to better understand the operational characteristics of opposed piston two-stroke engines. He joined Clemson in 2020. Additionally, he has experience using GT-Suite for vehicle drive-cycle modeling of conventional and hybridized powertrains.

email: ankurb@g.clemson.edu

Aditya Datar

Aditya Datar joined the ACRF in 2022 as a PhD student. He has been working with a team of students and staff to commission the new Vehicle Propulsion Lab with the Detroit Diesel DD13 engine. He has interests in experimental research methods applied to internal combustion engines and alternative fuels, and reduced order modeling using GT-Suite. He received his Bachelors degree from the Pune University.

John Gandolfo

John Gandolfo received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stony Brook University in 2019. He joined Clemson and the ACRF lab in 2020 as a PhD student. He has experience with Converge CFD simulations of two-stroke engine breathing, and John has experience as an experimentalist where he has tested thermal barrier coatings (TBC) in spark ignition combustion. He has worked on the DOE project with Achates Power, as well as a DOE-funded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project in collaboration with Solution Spray Technologies (SST).

email: gandolf@g.clemson.edu

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=1Mxti0cAAAAJ

Jim Gohn

James (Jim) Gohn received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stony Brook University in 2020. Later that year, he joined the ACRF at Clemson as a PhD student. He has experience with experimental engine research as well as with reduced-order engine thermodynamic and heat transfer modeling. He is currently supported through the Virtual Prototyping for Ground Systems (VIPR-GS) center funded by the U.S. Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC)

email: jgohn@g.clemson.edu

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_YPYStYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Prakash Koirala

Prakash Koirala is a Masters Thesis student in the ACRF lab who started in 2022. His research is related to 3D CFD and FEA of Gasoline Compression Ignition combustion and conventional diesel combustion to understand the thermal environment, the heat fluxes experienced by the piston, and the resulting temperatures in the piston, with and without thermal barrier coatings (TBCs). He received his Bachelor’s degree from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Mohit Kumar

Mohit Kumar is a CFD researcher studying diesel combustion for the VIPR-GS Army Center housed in Clemson University’s Automotive Engineering Department. He received his Bachelor’s degree from National Institute Of Technology Hamirpur, India, and he received his Masters degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India where he was voted most likely to star in a bollywood version of the a Jason Stathum movie. He joined the ACRF as a PhD student in 2022.

Rahul Motwani

Rahul Motwani received his master’s in Automotive Engineering from Clemson University in 2020. He was a member of the Deep Orange 10 team. After completing his master’s degree, Rahul joined the ACRF in 2021 as a PhD student. His research is related to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations of spark ignition engines with thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) to better understand how to model the effects of TBCs as a heat loss reduction method for internal combustion engines.

email: rmotwan@g.clemson.edu

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bgQuTRsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Patrick O’Donnell

Patrick O’Donnell is a PhD student in the ACRF Lab at Clemson University. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Math and Statistics from Stony Brook University in 2019, before joining Clemson as a graduate student. His expertise is related to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of engines and combustion. He has worked with Sandia National Laboratories to simulate Low Temperature Gasoline Combustion (LTGC) using Large Eddy Simulations (LES). He has also worked on RANS and LES simulations of the opposed-piston two-stroke engine to better understand the scavenging and combustion processes.

email: odonne9@g.clemson.edu

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aFn65GUAAAAJ&hl=en

Avinash Ravikumar

Avinash Ravikumar graduated with his master’s degree in Automotive Engineering from Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) in 2020. He returned to continue his studies as a PhD student in 2021 in the ACRF Lab at Clemson. His research involves system level modeling with GT-Suite, as well as CFD and FEA modeling with Converge CFD and Abaqus, respectively. He is working under the VIPR-GS center to understand the piston temperature limitations in high power density diesel engines operating at high load.

email: araviku@g.clemson.edu

Kunal Vedpathak

Kunal started working with the ACRF as a Masters student in the summer of 2022 before converting to a PhD student in the fall. His research interests are as an experimentalist working on heavy duty diesel and advanced compression ignition. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai.

Past Group Members

Dr. Ziming Yan

Dr. Ziming Yan received his PhD from the ACRF Lab at Clemson University in August of 2021. He stayed for a postdoc until leaving in February of 2022 for Mahle Powertrain in Plymouth, MI. While Ziming was a member of the group, he was an experimentalist with a significant amount of reduced-order modeling expertise. His primary focus was thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) for advanced combustion strategies including gasoline compression ignition (GCI) through a project funded by Aramco Services Company in Novi, MI. He wrote a 1D heat conduction solver that can be coupled to a 0D thermodynamic engine cycle model to predict the surface temperature of the TBC and its effect on the engine cycle thermodynamics. The ACRF still heavily uses Ziming’s heat conduction solver in active research projects related to TBCs.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=oGbHHgMAAAAJ&hl=en

Dr. Mozhgan Rahimi Boldaji

Dr. Mozhgan Rahimi Boldaji was a postdoctoral researcher with with ACRF Lab from 2019 to 2020. Her expertise was related to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling of advanced combustion processes. She started developing a combustion process that we call Thermally Stratified Compression Ignition (TSCI) as a PhD student at Stony Brook and helped perform some of the first simulations related to wet ethanol in TSCI as a PhD and then postdoc at Clemson. The ACRF is continue to pursue wet ethanol and methanol in compression ignition combustion building from Mozhgan’s initial simulations. Mozhgan is currently a Lead CFD Engineer at Nikola Corporation.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6FUyppcAAAAJ&hl=en

Other Past Group Members

In addition to Mozhgan, the Engine Combustion Research Group from Stony Brook University had several previously graduated PhD students including Dr. Deivanayagam (Deiva) Hariharan, Dr. Yingcong Zhou, and Dr. Aimilios Sofianopoulos who all graduated with their PhDs from Stony Brook University and are currently a postdoc at the University of Alabama, working for an electronics start-up company in Shanghai, and working for Mainspring Energy, respectively.

Deiva: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=93RXAFkAAAAJ&hl=en

Yingcong: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_6OW4ZgAAAAJ&hl=en

Aimilios: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=rGNuTl0AAAAJ