Professor Louge's research group is concerned with fundamental studies of gas-solid flows. In this context, they performed experiments, computer simulations, and computer modeling of various gas-solid regimes.

Using a unique experimental facility with the ability to recycle gases of arbitrary composition, they studied the hydrodynamics, heat transfer, and scale-up of circulating fluidization, a process that has industrial applications as diverse as coal combustion and catalytic cracking. In a circulating fluidized bed, particles are entrained in a pipe by a gas stream at high velocity.

Because their physical understanding of gas-solid flows is often limited by their ability to measure local flow parameters, they are also developing new measurement techniques such as fiber-optic probes to measure particle-velocity statistics and capacitance probes to record local particle density.

Two other projects are conducted jointly with James Jenkins of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. In the first, they simulated rapid granular flows on a computer by following the collisions and the motion of a large number of particles interacting in a periodic array. In this way, they verified theories of rapid granular flows, which are crucial in the dynamics of rock slides or snow avalanches. In the other, they designed and operated a microgravity experiment to study the segregation of grains by size or mass. They tested the device on the KC-135 microgravity aircraft operated by NASA. Their objective is to fly the experiment on the Space Station.

Professor Louge conducted his graduate research at Stanford University's High Temperature Gas Dynamics Laboratory, and then worked for a year as a process development engineer at Shell International in The Netherlands, where he contributed to new process designs involving circulating and dense-phase fluidized beds. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1985. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.