Hypersonic computational simulation developments and improvements are critical to the advancement of current and future flight vehicle designs. Ground tests, such as wind tunnel testing, are unable to capture all of the flight envelope and conditions (including high enthalpy conditions) but can be used for flowfield discovery and verification & validation. The cost of flight tests is extremely high, and there have been very few hypersonic flight tests, making it challenging to design vehicles based on the information we have learned from those flight tests. Computational method developers believe there are numerous “gaps” in the necessary capability to support design, test, and evaluation, including: combustion physics, turbulence modeling, turbulence transition, fluid-thermal-structural interactions, shock-boundary layer interactions, ablation, etc. This research opportunity will pursue specific high fidelity modeling and simulation approaches to fill in some of the “gaps” in order to improve hypersonic design simulation of flight vehicles. This could include model development and improvement, developing methods for applying high-fidelity simulation approaches to design and vehicle development, working with experimentalists to validate simulation models and methods, and application of the methods to hypersonic simulation in order to address the applicability and usefulness of the methods that have been developed.

 

key words

Hypersonic; High Speed Aerodynamics; CFD; Modeling and Simulation; Computational Simulation

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral and Senior applicants