Research topics
Since the summer of 2006, I’ve been performing research in the area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). CFD was pretty much invented to facilitate aerodynamic design. The basic idea is that you use a computer and tricky algorithms to solve the equations that govern and dictate how air and fluids move. As computers are getting EXTREMELY fast, this can be done quickly and reveal cool insights about airplane design and gas dynamics.
Since a wind tunnel is expensive and limited to the speed of the air and the size of the test area, CFD has some amazing advantages. It allows engineers and designers to quickly test new designs and evaluate performance.
These same techniques can be applied to study fluid dynamics itself and how fluids and fluid like materials behave. The computer programs I have been using, simulate fluid motion to an amazing degree of detail.
CFD - A wind tunnel in your computer
February 10, 2008
publications and presentations
This is a snapshot of a CFD simulation of the shuttle at re-entry. Nasa modeled this using a supercomputer and program called CART3D.
This shows two fluids mixing together in a turbulent fashion. (Rayleigh-Taylor) This mixing causes shock waves to form in the upper fluid. Blue is slow moving fluid and red is fast,... like Mach 2.
A 2-D simulation of “shear flow” where two fluids are moving in opposite directions. The interface between them become unstable and they roll up and become waves. This process is called Kelvin-Hemholtz instability and was simulated by a code I’m developing.
2-D Rocket Nozzle start-up showing flow separation and re-attachment. Shock waves are also seen here. In 3-D, when this happens, the rocket experiences sides loads which impact nozzle design and performance.