Norbert Peters (engineer)

Norbert Peters (10 July 1942 – 4 July 2015) was a professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany and one of the world-wide authorities in the field of combustion engineering. He headed the Institut für Technische Verbrennung (Institute for Combustion Technology).

Norbert Peters
Born	(1942-07-10)July 10, 1942 Linz, Austria
Died	July 4, 2015(2015-07-04) (aged 72)
Alma mater	Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Technische Universität Berlin
Known for	Borghi–Peters diagram Laminar flamelet model Peters four-step chemistry
Scientific career
Fields	Combustion Aerospace Engineering
Institutions	Stanford University RWTH Aachen University
Thesis	Solving the boundary-layer equations for chemically reacting gases using a multigrid method  (1971)
Doctoral advisor	Alfred Walz Karl Stephan

Education and career

Born in Linz, Austria, he was educated at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe and later at the Technische Universität Berlin.^[1] He worked in Rourkela Steel Plant for six months.

Peters's primary research interest was in the field of combustion science, especially turbulent flames. The interaction between turbulence and combustion constituted an important part of his research. He was author of the book titled Turbulent Combustion, a monograph with excellent but challenging insights on the advances, problems, and active research in the field of combustion in turbulent flow media. He was well known for his ideas on the Laminar flamelet model in turbulent combustion as well as for the systematic generation of reduced reaction mechanisms from detailed reaction mechanisms.

Books

• Norbert Peters (1992). Fifteen lectures on laminar and turbulent combustion.
• Norbert Peters (2000). Turbulent Combustion. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521660822.

Awards and honours

He had received numerous recognitions for his contributions,^[2] including:

• Honorary Doctorate degrees from University of Brussels (1994), Technical University of Darmstadt (2002) and ETH Zurich (2010)
• Zeldovich Medal of Combustion Institute (2002) ^[3]
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1990) ^[4]
• Member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (since 2002)

See also

• Forman A. Williams
• Amable Liñán
• Paul Clavin