Newsletter Archives; Fall 1997
Professor Emeritus David Pratt
| A native of Shelley,
Idaho, David T. Pratt was born on September 14, 1934. He earned his
BSME from the University of Washington in 1956. Commissioned a Second Lieutenant
in the U.S. Marine Corps upon graduation, he served on active duty as an
Infantry Officer from 1956 until 1960. From 1961 until 1964 he was Assistant
Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical
Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 and 1968,
respectively.
From 1968 to 1976 Professor Pratt served as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Washington State University, and as Associate Dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture. He moved to the University of Utah in 1976, serving as Professor of Mechanical Engineering until 1978. From 1978 to 1981 he was Professor and Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, University of Michigan. He came to the University of Washington in 1981, serving as Professor and Chair of Mechanical Engineering from 1981 to 1986. While on leave from 1986 to 1987, Professor Pratt was Research Director, Supercomputing, at Aerojet Propulsion Research Institute. He returned to the UW in 1987. From 1994 to 1996 he served as Graduate Program Coordinator for the Department. He retired on January 1, 1997. Professor Pratt specializes in theoretical and computational modeling of combustion processes. His principal research direction is the selection, design and application of computational algorithms to the design and simulation of furnaces and combustors. Current research includes supersonic combustion for hypersonic air-breathing propulsion; interactive PC software for management of thermochemical and chemical kinetic data; and modeling of pre-vaporized premixed low-emission gas turbine combustors. During the 1974-75 academic year Professor Pratt was a Senior Fulbright-Hayes Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. He was also David Pierpont Gardner Faculty Fellow at the University of Utah in 1978, and was awarded the Ralph M. Teetor award by the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1979. Professor Pratt is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Combustion Institute. Upon retirement Professor Pratt indicated
that he wished to continue teaching a class or two for the Department. His
schedule, however, quickly filled with consulting and short course work,
but he still hopes to return in the near future and teach ME 584: Combustion
in Airbreathing Propulsion "just one last time."
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