The IUTAM Symposium on "Combustion in Supersonic Flows" was held in Poitiers at Ecole Nationale Superieure de Mecanique et d'Aerotechnique (ENSMA) from 2 to 6 october 1995. The Symposium was hosted by the Laboratoire de Combustion et de Detonique (UPR - CNRS 9028) and was attended by 60 delegates from 10 countries. The formal presentations and invited lectures were focused on four main topics, related to combustion in supersonic streams and practical issues relative to the development of new propulsion system: fundamental studies on premixed and unpremixed combustion, fluid dynamic aspects of supersonic combustion, practical system including Scramjet, Ramaccelerators and Pulsed Detonation Engines, application of detonation to propulsion. Invited lectures presenting the state of the art on these topics as well as available data base were delivered by professors Paul A. Libby from University of California at San Diego, Vladimir Sabel'nikov from TsAGI (Russia), Paul Clavin from IRPHE (Marseille, France) and Drs Shmuel Eidelman from SAlC (USA), Gunter Smeets from the French-German Institut of Saint-Louis and Bruno Deshaies from LCD (poi tiers, France).

This volume contains selected presentations of the IUTAM Symposium on Combustion in Supersonic Flows' held in Poitiers at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Mecanique et d'Aerotechnique (ENSMA) from 2 to 6 October 1995. The presentations focus on four main topics related to combustion in supersonic streams and practical issues relevant to the development of new propulsion systems: fundamental studies of premixed and unpremixed combustion, fluid dynamics aspects of supersonic combustion, practical systems including Scramjet, Ramaccelerators and Pulsed Detonation Engines, and the application of detonation to propulsion. Important progress has been made in the understanding of local mechanisms which allow combustion to be stabilized in a supersonic flow; in particular, various mechanisms controlled by mixing, chemical kinetics, viscous heating and shock waves are now well identified. Despite the difficulty of developing experimental work on supersonic combustion, a good set of experimental data is now available, allowing validation of theoretical analysis and models. The main aspects of modelling of turbulent combustion in high speed flows were discussed, including the influence of turbulent fluctuations on the chemistry-controlled phase of combustion and the applicability of flamelet models to high speed flows. The full range of numerical approaches is covered including Direct Numerical Simulation, Large Eddy Simulation, k-epsilon and shock tracking methods. A considerable effort has been made to generalize these methods to the treatment of supersonic reactive flows and to develop new numerical methods taking into account the most recent theoretical work and a better understanding of the underlying physics."