The Second International RCM Workshop was held on the Berkeley campus of the University of California on August 1, 2014. The continuing focus was on scientific and engineering advances possible via rapid compression machines (RCMs) as experimental platforms. The overarching goals of the Workshop are to advance the development of next-generation fuels and combustion technologies, as well as combustion models that have sufficient predictive capability for use in the design of future combustion engines.

This second meeting brought together a diverse group of experimentalists, modelers and theoreticians with expertise in RCMs and relevant techniques to review the state-of-the-art in experimental and computational methods including machine design, operation and utilization, and to discuss current challenges as well as future pathways towards improving the understanding of low-temperature combustion (LTC) phenomena.

Recent, community-wide efforts were covered, including reports addressing how 13 laboratories conducted equivalent experiments using iso-octane as a representative fuel, in order to better understand facility-dependent influences and to improve the methods for reporting/analyzing/comparing LTC data from different machines. This is a first step towards uniformly characterizing and better comprehending the operation of existing RCM facilities, and follows the successful framework recently utilized by the Engine Combustion Network (ECN), as well as other relevant workshops.