J. William Rich

Professor Emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering rich.2@osu.edu

J. William “Bill” Rich obtained the B.S. in Mechnical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and the Master of Aeronautical Engineering degree from the University of Virginia. He has the M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he was a Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellow.  Prior to coming to The Ohio State University, he was a Principal Engineer and Head of the Physics and Chemistry Section at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now, Calspan Corporation). At The Ohio State University, he held the Ralph W. Kurtz Chair, and founded the Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics Laboratory in the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He has been an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and has held visiting faculty appointments at Carnegie Mellon University and Ecole Centrale Paris, where he was a senior Fullbright Fellow.  Dr. Rich's scholarly interests centers on theoretical and experimental research into chemically-reacting flows, gas phase molecular energy transfer processes, nonequilibrium gas dynamics, ionized gas processes, and high-energy lasers.  He is the inventor of the electrically excited supersonic flow CO laser, and of processes for separating stable isotopes in nonequilibrium reacting flows. He has developed methods of sustaining atmospheric-pressure electric discharges in cold molecular gases, with inhibition of electron attachment in oxygen-containing gases. He holds 8 U.S. Patents, and is the author of more than 200 journal papers and scientific reports in these fields. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the recipient of the 2008 Plasmadynamics and Lasers Award from the AIAA.