Howard Pearlman

Howard Pearlman (Howard Gary Pearlman) is an American combustion and thermal-fluids scientist. His research concerns low-gravity combustion: flame balls on space shuttle flights, cool flames (faint, low-temperature flame from incomplete fuel oxidation), and low-temperature autoignition, and premixed flame behavior across gravitational levels.¹ He trained in mechanical engineering and combustion hydrodynamics, not pharmacology;² a widely indexed 2019 paper on antifungal pharmacokinetics by a same-name Howard Pearlman belongs to a separate clinical pharmacokineticist whose identity cannot be confirmed against the combustion scientist's record, and that work is not attributed to him here.³

Education and career path

Pearlman completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 1992 with a dissertation on the hydrodynamics and combustion of spherically rotating and periodically strained flows, advised by Siavash Haghighat Sohrab.² This training in combustion and fluid mechanics, rather than any biomedical field, set the direction of his subsequent record.

His academic teaching and supervision included Drexel University, where he advised two doctoral students: Michael Foster, whose thesis was completed in 2007, and Yi Ma, completed in 2009.² Government research repositories later list him at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and at Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc. in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an engineering company specializing in thermal management, for research on cool flames and related thermal sciences.¹

The NASA connection

In 1998, he co-authored the preliminary results of the Structure of Flame Balls at Low Lewis-number (SOFBALL) experiment flown on space shuttle mission STS-83, with Paul D. Ronney, Ming-Shin Wu, and Karen J. Weiland.⁴ The low-gravity setting matters because at near-zero gravity the Rayleigh number (Ra) associated with the self-heating of the reaction can be kept below the critical Ra (approximately 600) at which buoyant convection begins.¹ This paper is his most cited work, with 77 indexed citations, and his second most cited paper, on near-limit premixed flames in tubes at normal and low gravity (Physics of Fluids, 1994, with Ronney), addresses the same low-gravity theme.⁴

Research and contributions

A recurring question in Pearlman's work is how gravity alters low-temperature combustion. In cool-flame experiments, equimolar n-butane:oxygen premixtures at 320–350 °C (593–623 K) and subatmospheric pressure were burned in a closed, unstirred, static reactor under terrestrial gravity (1g), Martian gravity (0.38g), Lunar gravity (0.16g), and reduced gravity (about 10^-2g).¹ The physical basis for the gravity dependence is buoyant convection: the Rayleigh number associated with the self-heating of the reaction exceeds the critical value of approximately 600 at which convection begins on Earth, while at near-zero gravity Ra below 600 can be achieved, so the flame develops without convective distortion.¹

On the modeling side, he extended the Gray-Yang skeletal chemical kinetic model, a reduced scheme for low-temperature hydrocarbon oxidation, to a two-dimensional axisymmetric spherical geometry, coupling species, energy, and momentum equations and testing the results against reduced-gravity flame-radius data.¹ This connected a classical ignition-kinetics model with the microgravity experiments rather than treating them separately.

His later industry-era work shifted toward applied thermal and plasma problems while keeping the same physics base. Recorded projects include corrosion testing for thermal energy storage systems (2017) and, with Shridhar Shenoy, Alexander Rabinovich, and Alexander Fridman, process optimization of methane reforming to syngas using a Gliding Arc Plasmatron (Plasma Processes and Polymers, 2019).⁴ Across the full record, recurring topics are combustion and flame dynamics (26 papers) and rocket and propulsion systems research (9 papers).⁴

References

1. OSTI.GOV search results, author: Pearlman, Howard. https://www.osti.gov/search/author:%22Pearlman,%20Howard%22
2. Howard Gary Pearlman, The Mathematics Genealogy Project. https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=161176
3. No Dose Adjustment for Isavuconazole Based on Age or Sex, Antimicrob Agents Chemother (2019), PMID 30962330. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30962330/
4. Howard Pearlman, Rankless scholar profile. https://www.rankless.org/authors/howard-pearlman

Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Engineers and computer scientists › Engineers and materials scientists › Researchers in mechanical and aerospace engineering, robotics, and control › Combustion and reacting flows

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026

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