Studying the Emissions and Chemistry of Fire Aerosols: From Pyrolysis to Photochemical Reactors and Pile Burns to Plumes
Speaker: Dr. Shantanu Jathar
Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Colorado State University (CSU).
When: May 15, 2025 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Location: CEME Building, room 2202 (6250 Applied Science Lane, Vancouver)
The Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Distinguished Colloquium series invites leading researchers to share their expertise on a variety of topics with our academic community.
Abstract:
Fires — including wildland, prescribed, agricultural, and increasingly, wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires — are significant sources of aerosols (fine particles) and its precursors to the atmosphere. Fire aerosols have important implications for air quality, climate, and public health from local to global scales. Despite their importance, large uncertainties remain in our understanding of fire aerosol emissions and their atmospheric evolution across different spatial and temporal scales. In this talk, I will present work from our research group from a suite of laboratory, field, and modeling studies aimed at understanding the emissions, chemistry, and properties of fire aerosols. I will begin by showing results from a recent study focused on quantifying air pollutant emissions from the combustion of structural fuels under varying combustion conditions and fire scales. Next, I will discuss two chamber studies that investigated the multigenerational oxidation of biomass burning emissions across short (<12 hr) and long (>24 hr) photochemical ages. I will then describe how these laboratory efforts were integrated into a Lagrangian box model to simulate fire aerosol evolution in large-scale wildfire plumes. Finally, I will highlight an ongoing project deploying rotary-wing drones equipped with low-SWaP-C (size, weight, power, and cost) sensors to measure near-source emissions from prescribed and structural fires.
Biography:
Dr. Shantanu Jathar is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU). His research interests lie at the intersection of energy and the environment and at CSU he leads the Laboratory for Air Quality Research. He and his research group leverage laboratory experiments, field measurements, and numerical models to study the emissions, evolution, and properties of aerosols arising from energy and combustion sources. He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Government College of Engineering Pune, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. He is married to an electrical engineer who works at the city utility to expand renewable energy use and he is a proud parent of two energetic kids who like swimming, skiing, and science. In his spare time, he dabbles in endurance sports, coffee art, and the Indian bansuri.