Home > Joseph Powers

# Joseph M. Powers

## Professor, Associate Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Email: powers@nd.edu

Phone: 574-631-5978

Office: 365B Fitzpatrick Hall

## Education

Ph.D, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988

M.S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985

B.S., Mechanical Engineering - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983

## Biography

Dr. Powers received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983, 1985, and 1988, respectively. His research interests include computational mechanics, scientific computing, detonation theory, pyrotechnic combustion, high speed propulsion, transition to detonation in solid propellants, high speed flows in reactive porous media, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, numerical and theoretical methods for multiscale phenomena, and systematic reduction of large systems of chemical kinetics. He is the author of several papers in the archival literature and has supervised many M.S. and Ph.D. students since joining the faculty in 1989. He serves Associate Editor for the Journal of Propulsion and Power. He has held summer appointments at NASA Glenn Research Center, the U. S. Air Force Wright Laboratories at Eglin AFB, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He presently leads the Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification team in the Center for Shock Wave-processing of Advanced Reactive Materials (C-SWARM). He is the recipient of the University of Notre Dame's Amoco-College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 1994, the Department Faculty Award in 1997, the Spira Award for teaching excellence in 2010, and the College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 2014. He received a NASA Innovative Technology Award in 1999. Dr. Powers is a member of APS, SIAM, ASME, ASEE, the Combustion Institute, and is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA.

## Summary of Activities/Interests

Combustion, Fluid Mechanics, Thermochemistry, Computational Science, Applied Mathematics

## News

May 9, 2018

Three engineering faculty are among the 20 faculty members have received Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Two of the three honored honored with Dockweiler Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising are also engineering faculty.

### Powers Publishes Second Graduate Textbook

April 25, 2016

Combustion Thermodynamics and Dynamics, a new graduate-level monograph by Joseph M. Powers, builds on the foundation of thermal science, chemistry, and applied mathematics laid during undergraduate programs in aerospace, mechanical, and chemical engineering.

### Powers Succeeds Talley as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Propulsion and Power

January 18, 2016

Joseph M. Powers has been appointed editor-in-chief of the Journal of Propulsion and Power. He succeeds Douglas Talley of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.

### New Book Highlights Modern Mathematical Methods Used in Advanced Engineering Applications

April 9, 2015

A new textbook written by Joseph M. Powers, professor and associate chair in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and Mihir Sen, professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, and published by Cambridge University Press targets engineering graduate students who wonder how much of their basic mathematics will be of use in practice.

July 8, 2013