Description

This fellowship opportunity focuses on advancing the fundamental understanding of hypersonic vehicle aerodynamics and propulsion through the development of numerical simulation methods. Hypersonic flight involves unique and challenging physics, including extremely high temperatures that cause significant thermal loads and excite vibrational energy modes in gas molecules, leading to chemical dissociation and reactions both in the air and on vehicle surfaces.

From a propulsion perspective, the most efficient thrust generation uses air-breathing engines, which require stabilizing combustion flames under highly adverse supersonic or high-subsonic flow conditions inside the combustor.

The research aims to elucidate the basic physics underlying these phenomena by simulating complex, non-equilibrium, chemically reacting flows. Potential research topics include:

• Transition to turbulence in hypersonic boundary layers
• High-temperature air chemical kinetics
• Non-equilibrium and rarefied gas flows
• Surface ablation
• Shock-turbulence interaction
• Hypervelocity impact of water and ice particulates
• Droplet and crystal breakup in high-shear flows
• Fluid-structure interactions
• Pyrolysis of heterogeneous solid fuels
• Particulate and droplet combustion
• Flame holding within a scramjet
• Gas-phase radiation transport
• Magnetohydrodynamics of wake turbulence

This opportunity is hosted at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, within the Lab for Computational Physics & Fluid Dynamics.