Strehlow had been editor of Combustion and Flame since 1984, the year he retired as Professor of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Professor Strehlow was an acknowledged expert in the field of detonations and explosions; he also made significant contributions to understanding the structure, stability and extinction of laminar premixed flames. He experimentally observed the qualitative dependence of laminar burning velocities of positively-stretched expanding flames on the mixture diffusivity and also reported on the relative propensity of laminar flames to exhibit cellular diffusional-thermal instability. He was an early advocate of microgravity combustion to study flame properties, and successfully characterized the extinction and flammability states of flames under microgravity conditions.
The pioneering effort of Professor Strehlow has contributed significantly to our current understanding of the detailed structure of multi-headed detonation waves. He made significant contributions to the study of the structure of cellular detonations. In the period spanning the 1960s, he was very active in this area and made a very thorough study of the detailed transverse wave structure of the detonation front. Together with Professor H. O. Barthel he formulated a theoretical model to predict the transverse wave spacing. He also formulated a systematic correlation between the cell size and the induction kinetics of explosive mixtures. This work has served as a basis for detailed kinetic modelling of cellular detonations in recent years. In the early 1970s he turned to the study of non-ideal