Madison, WisconsinㅡMar 1, 2022ㅡDr. Eric Pomraning, Co-Owner and Vice President of Convergent Science, has been named an SAE Fellow for his leading role in creating advanced computational fluid dynamics software and developing combustion and turbulence models that are widely used to design cleaner and more efficient propulsion systems. SAE Fellow, SAE International's highest grade of membership, recognizes long-term members whose exceptional leadership, scientific achievements, and innovation have made a significant impact on society's mobility technology.

"SAE International is the premier engineering organization for the automotive industry, an area in which I've worked for most of my professional life, so receiving this recognition is an incredible honor," said Pomraning.

Pomraning is a founder and owner of Convergent Science and one of the original developers of CONVERGE CFD software. He led the development and implementation of many of the numerical algorithms, turbulence models, and combustion models in CONVERGE, which are used by engine makers around the world as a key design tool for improving internal combustion (IC) engines. During graduate school, Pomraning developed the dynamic structure large eddy simulation (LES) model, which provides highly realistic and predictive results for IC engine simulations. Two decades after the introduction of dynamic LES, it remains one of the most widely used turbulence models by the combustion community. In addition, Pomraning developed the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) algorithms in CONVERGE, which transformed reacting flow simulations for propulsion system optimization.

Pomraning has performed many first-of-their-kind engine simulations that have greatly impacted the automotive industry, such as using direct detailed chemistry to model combustion, showing grid convergence in Lagrangian spray calculations for both Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and LES models, and demonstrating the ability of unsteady RANS (URANS) to predict cycle-to-cycle variability.

In addition to these achievements, Pomraning is heavily involved in the combustion community. He is a member of both SAE and ASME and an active contributor to many industry consortia, including the Computational Chemistry Consortium which he co-founded. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches a graduate-level course in engine CFD, and he participates in many collaborations with global research institutes.