Dr. Joseph Kalman

Dr. Joseph Kalman joined the CSULB Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2018. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Mechanical Engineering in 2014. Dr. Kalman worked in the Combustion Science and Propulsion Research Branch at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division in China Lake, Calif., from 2014-2018. His research focuses on combustion of solid fuels and energetic materials (solid composite propellants) for propulsion and defense applications with an emphasis on non-intrusive diagnostic. His work seeks to understand the underlying physics and chemistry of how these materials ignite, decompose, and deflagrate. Previous work has studied high-temperature spectral emissivity of metal oxide particles, ball-milled boron/PTFE composites, and combustion of submicron CL-20 propellants. Recently, he has worked on applying synchrotron based x-ray diagnostics to unravel the low temperature decomposition mechanism of ammonium perchlorate, a common oxidizer, and was the first to use x-rays to make in-situ measurements of aluminum agglomerates at motoring pressure.