Welcome
I’m Kyle Niemeyer, a PhD student studying combustion modeling, science contributor for Ars Technica, husband—not necessarily in that order. You can find out more about me by poking around the links above and below.
Research
My day job is as a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. My advisor is Professor Chih-Jen (Jackie) Sung of the University of Connecticut, who runs the Combustion Diagnostics Laboratory there.
My current research goal is the integration of detailed and accurate chemistry in combustion modeling. Some of the strategies I’m exploring include chemical mechanism simplification and the use of graphics hardware (GPU computing) to accelerate reactive flow calculations.
See my publications page for my journal and conference papers, as well as my master’s thesis.
I’m hoping to graduate in May 2013, and will be seeking a post-doc or full-time faculty position. You can check out my application documents here:
Science
Writing
Since June 2011, I also work in my spare time (ha!) as a science contributor at Ars Technica, where I’ve reported on scientific articles covering a range of topics (e.g., energy, climate, technology) to a technically but not necessarily scientifically literate audience, with audiences of in the tens of thousands each month.
Here are some of my favorite and popular pieces:
- “The US Navy wants great (rotating, detonating) balls of fire!”
- “The road ahead: How we’ll get to 54.5 mpg by 2025”
- “Mosquitos survive collisions with objects 50 times their weight: raindrops”
- “Why you should read the book Before the Lights Go Out”
- “Chain reaction: the (slow) revival of US nuclear power”
- “The spice must flow: new model describes the evolution of desert dunes”
- “What makes the fuel go boom? Turbulence!”