Aerospace Mechanics Research Center (AMReC)

Aircrafts of the future: Boosting aerodynamic performance by engineered surface vibrations

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:04:27 +0000

Aircrafts of the future: Boosting aerodynamic performance by engineered surface vibrations Jeff Zehnder Mon, 03/24/2025 - 09:04

Jeff Zehnder

“This is probably the most radical conceptual advancement for airplanes since the replacement of propellers with jets.” – M.I. Hussein

Mahmoud I. Hussein is not pulling punches about the potential impact of a major aerospace materials research project.

As the principal investigator of a $7.5 million, five-year Department of Defense Office of Naval Research (ONR) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), Hussein is leading an effort to reshape the fundamental character of fluid-structure interactions to reduce drag on high-speed aerospace vehicles—the focus of the project.

“Since the dawn of aviation, aircraft design has been based on the premise of shaping the surface of the vehicle to create lift and minimize drag. Our team is pursuing a new paradigm where the phononic properties, or intrinsic vibrations, of a surface or subsurface provide an additional pathway to interact with the airflow, to enhance the vehicle performance in an unprecedented manner,” said Hussein, the Alvah and Harriet Hovlid Professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ.

Hussein also has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Physics and an affiliation with the Materials Science and Engineering Program.

MURI Partners

�鶹ӰԺ

Mahmoud I. Hussein
Professor & Principal Investigator
Armin Kianfar
Post-Doctoral Associate
Adam Harris
PhD Student

University of Maryland

Christoph Brehm
Associate Professor

Johns Hopkins University

Kevin Hemker
Professor

Purdue University

Joseph Jewell
Associate Professor

Applied Physics Laboratory

Keith Caruso
Principal Staff Engineer
Ken Kane
Researcher

University of Kentucky

Alexandre Martin
Professor

Case Western Reserve University

Bryan Schmidt
Assistant Professor

Office of Naval Research (Program Directors)

Eric Marineau
Eric Wuchina

Phononic Subsurfaces

Turbulent airflow is detrimental to the fuel economy and the surface temperature of aircrafts as they soar through the atmosphere. This research aims to mitigate the transition to turbulence using phononic subsurfaces (PSubs) – synthetic designed materials affixed beneath the surface of a wing or vehicle body that passively manipulate small-amplitude vibrations, and by extension flow fluctuations, point-by-point along the surface.

Turbulence and Fuel Economy

Passenger planes consume over 10,000 gallons of jet fuel on a single cross-country trip, so improvements in fuel economy could lead to big savings for airlines. The potential in hypersonic crafts is even more dramatic.

Hypersonic vehicles travel at velocities at least five times the speed of sound. The turbulence that results from such speeds causes the surface of the vehicles to heat up to thousands of degrees, requiring they be constructed of exotic, expensive materials.

“By introducing a phononic subsurface to precisely shape the vibrations along the surface, we can alter the way the air interacts with the vehicle such that we ultimately don’t need to come up with exceedingly high-temperature-resistant materials,” Hussein said. “We’re passively manipulating instabilities in air flow in a manner that is favorable in the boundary layer where the vehicle meets the surrounding air.”

2015 to Today

The concept of PSubs was discovered by Hussein. The work began from a collaboration over 15 years ago between Hussein and then CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Sedat Biringen, who died in 2020. As leaders in the newly-born research area of phononics and the longstanding field of fluid dynamics, respectively, they worked together to theoretically demonstrate–for the first time–a way to manipulate phonons to improve the efficiency of flight, with tremendous potential for the aerospace industry and prospects for application to water vessels as well.

Recently Hussein gathered a team of experts from across the country to take the concept of PSubs to the next level with this hypersonics MURI grant. Over the duration of the project, the group will develop high-fidelity models and fabricate functional prototypes to effectively characterize and demonstrate the technology in high-speed wind tunnels.

“We’re most confident about this endeavor, because the idea is rooted in fundamental science marrying–in quite a sophisticated fashion–fluid dynamics with condensed matter physics as well as with the emerging field of elastic metamaterials,” Hussein said.

“This is probably the most radical conceptual advancement for airplanes since the replacement of propellers with jets.” – Mahmoud Hussein is not pulling punches about the potential impact of a major aerospace materials research project.

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:36:02 +0000

Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research Jeff Zehnder Thu, 03/13/2025 - 10:36

Jeff Zehnder

(Clockwise from top left) Alireza Doostan,
Ken Jansen, Stephen Becker, and John Evans.

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research.

A professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million Department of Energy project to change how researchers handle the massive amounts of data that result from complex physics problems like modeling turbulence and aerodynamics for air and space craft.

Compressing data is nothing new when it comes to computing, but advances in high- performance systems are now creating so much data that it becomes impossible to store for later analysis.

“Computing power has increased drastically, but moving and storing that data is becoming a bottleneck. We have to reduce the size of the data generated through large scale simulation codes,” Doostan said.

While some scientific analysis of turbulence flows can be completed faster on ever larger high-performance computing platforms, much of the information must be discarded because the scope of the data is too vast to store, making it impossible to conduct later assessments.

“There is a lot of structure and physics embedded in the data that ideally needs to be preserved to study complex flow physics or develop faster models,” Doostan said.

The goal of the grant is to both maintain accuracy of modeling data while decreasing its complexity, and critically, allowing it to be stored by compressing it in-situ, or in real-time as it is created during modeling. This is not currently possible for large-scale models, as existing technology often requires some or the entire modeling simulation be completed before compression can begin.

Joining Doostan on the project is a team of CU �鶹ӰԺ faculty, including Ken Jansen and John Evans, both also from Smead Aerospace, and Stephen Becker from applied math.

The team is focused on development of both traditional and deep neural models for massively parallel implementation of novel linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques. It is a major undertaking, bringing together researchers with a broad range of backgrounds, including computational physics and sciences, discretization, machine learning, linear algebra, and statistics.

“This is a very interdisciplinary problem,” Doostan said. “This is not a problem one person can solve. You need a team.”

For Jansen, whose research focuses on turbulence modeling, an advance in compression could lead to significant progress across the spectrum of high-performance computing.

“This data compression research is critically important to provide access to the dynamics of our simulations,” Jansen said. “As simulations have passed petascale and are now exascale, it has become impractical to write the full solution fields to disk at a sufficient frequency and count, owing to the broad range of spatial and temporal scales of turbulence.”

The group has completed soon-to-be-published research showing strong promise for their approach. They are now working to scale up their algorithms to work at scale on supercomputing platforms like CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Blanca cluster as well as Department of Energy systems.

“There is still a lot to be done, but our early work has shown success and only increases the computational load by less than five percent,” Doostan said.

The three-year award runs through fall 2027. Doostan is hopeful their final product will include publicly available next-generation compression software for general use by all simulation practitioners.

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research. Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million...

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CU Engineering faculty land prestigious multidisciplinary Department of Defense projects

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:24:05 +0000

CU Engineering faculty land prestigious multidisciplinary Department of Defense projects Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/22/2024 - 09:24

Three faculty members from the CU �鶹ӰԺ College of Engineering and Applied Science are conducting projects awarded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program.

The highly competitive research program has been enabling major contributions to military capabilities and producing commercial sector applications since 1985.

“Our college emphasizes collaboration across various research disciplines,” said Michael Gooseff, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. “By prioritizing programs like MURI, we harness the diverse expertise across STEM fields to push the envelope for scientific breakthroughs.”

The three new MURI projects in the college include:

Mahmoud Hussein, professor in aerospace engineering sciences and in physics, will improve air flow across the wings and bodies of hypersonic aircraft through the use of phononic subsurface materials;
Francois Barthelat, professor in mechanical engineering, will develop and validate models for the failure of materials and structures under extreme loads; and
Scott Diddams, professor in electrical, computer and energy engineering and in physics, will examine the fundamental limits in heterodyne detection of thermal radiation with laser light.

Hussein is the main principal investigator and represents CU �鶹ӰԺ as the lead institution for that MURI project. Barthelat and Diddams will be collaborating on projects led by faculty from other peer institutions.

Each project will receive an average award of $7.5 million over the next five years.

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CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher lands NASA grant to advance hypersonics modeling

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 20:35:16 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher lands NASA grant to advance hypersonics modeling Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/09/2024 - 13:35

Jeff Zehnder

Robyn Macdonald is pushing the limits of hypersonic research with a new NASA grant.

Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, has been awarded a $600,000 Early Career award from NASA to improve computational modeling of turbulence at hypersonic speeds.

“If you’re flying at Mach 25, there is a lot of kinetic energy present in the gas that gets converted into other forms of energy before reaching the surface of your spacecraft, aircraft, or entry capsule,” Macdonald said. “Fully understanding this process is a really hard problem and is important for things like heat shield design and post-flight reconstruction.”

During hypersonic flight, the temperature of air and other gases around a vehicle can reach thousands of degrees, triggering chemical reactions. Despite recent developments in hypersonic vehicle design, the interaction of these chemical reactions with the surrounding hypersonic turbulent flow is not well understood.

“You need very detailed information, and you’re looking at a variety of scales in both time and space. The calculations become very expensive,” Macdonald said. “As a result there are deficiencies in the current models.”

Most current computational work for design of hypersonic vehicles uses a turbulence model called a Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solution (RANS). RANS is computationally efficient, making it attractive for design processes, but Macdonald said it relies on models which may be invalid for certain hypersonic regimes.

“It’s the current design paradigm, but its applicability is not well characterized for hypersonic flows, and we need better predictions as space missions go further into our solar system to places we don’t understand as well as Earth,” Macdonald said. “We can’t run dozens of experiments in a simulated Mars or Jupiter’s moon Titan environment in advance, so these models are really important.”

Macdonald intends to develop a Wall Modeled Large Eddy Simulation (WMLES) model which includes the relevant chemistry for hypersonic flows. WMLES provides an improvement over RANS by predicting the larger scale turbulent structures while making simplifying assumptions about the small scales of turbulence. However, there does not currently exist a WMLES model which includes the chemical reactions relevant for hypersonic flows. The innovation of this work is the inclusion of the chemistry within WMLES.

It is a significant undertaking requiring supercomputers; Macdonald expects to use CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Blanca Condo Cluster as well as NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer.

Over the course of the three-year grant, Macdonald and her team will formulate equations, write and verify software to conduct the analysis, and then run test cases to validate their results.

“It’s a big project, and I’m really excited. I like the chemistry. I like turbulence. This is exactly my area,” Macdonald said.

This is Macdonald’s second major hypersonics grant in as many years. She previously received a Young Investigator Research Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study gas-phase chemical reactions in the boundary layer at the surface of hypersonic vehicles.

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7 reasons to get excited about CU �鶹ӰԺ in space

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:11:43 +0000

7 reasons to get excited about CU �鶹ӰԺ in space Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/13/2023 - 11:11

This year, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) celebrates its 75th anniversary—marking 75 years of CU �鶹ӰԺ’s exploration of space, from the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere to the wide expanse of interstellar space.

The university is just getting started. In the year ahead, scientists and engineers from across campus will take part in the first U.S. landing on the moon’s south pole, launch several pint-sized satellites into orbit around Earth, and begin a journey to Jupiter’s dark and frigid moon Europa.

Follow along to learn what the next year holds in store for CU �鶹ӰԺ in space.

What goes up...

The festivities are scheduled to kick off Oct. 29 as a team from LASP launches a first-of-its-kind instrument in space from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico—to investigate the fallout from an explosion that roiled a corner of the galaxy roughly 15,000 years ago.

The launch is part of the Integral Field Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Experiment (INFUSE). The mission will shoot a rocket to about 250 miles above Earth’s surface, where it will point its instrument up into space, before falling back to Earth.

INFUSE is trying to learn more about the structure of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, a shock wave that was formed millennia ago as a star died in the constellation Cygnus the Swan.

And don’t miss these other upcoming missions that include scientists and engineers from LASP: SNIFS, EXIS and TSIS-2 will probe the sun and its radiation, while GOES-U will monitor weather on Earth and in space.

Image: Cygnus Loop (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Historic return

Well, hello, moon. Long time no see. CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers will soon take part in an effort to land science payloads from the United States on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era.

The event is part of NASA’s inaugural Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission. On Nov. 15, a NOVA-C lander built by the company Intuitive Machines is scheduled to launch for the moon’s south pole. Aboard will be an instrument called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES). ROLSES, made up of four antennas, will map out the layer of charged particles that hovers just about the surface of the moon—and could pose risks to future lunar astronauts.

“We are going to the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years,” said Jack Burns, a co-investigator on the instrument and professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

Image: Moon's south pole (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Happy birthday, MAVEN

A special spacecraft is celebrating a big birthday this year. Nov. 18 marks the 10th anniversary of the 2013 launch of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. Several of the instruments on the spacecraft were designed and built by scientists and engineers in �鶹ӰԺ at LASP.

MAVEN is helping to solve a Red Planet mystery: How did Mars, which was likely covered in oceans billions of years ago, lose all of its water? Data from the spacecraft revealed that radiation from the sun stripped away the �鶹ӰԺ atmosphere over time—transforming it into the cold and desolate landscape it is today.

MAVEN is still orbiting the planet and trying to unlock Mars’ secrets today.

Image: Artist's depiction of MAVEN at Mars. (Credit: NASA/GSFC)

Whoosh!

Hear that? A new, high-tech engineering lab is heading for campus—at speeds of nearly Mach 30, or more than 20,000 miles per hour.

In July, the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences kicked off construction on a new hypersonics research facility. This plasma wind tunnel will allow scientists to recreate what happens to spacecraft when they smack into Earth’s atmosphere at incredible speeds, heating up to temperatures of more than 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The new wind tunnel is the brainchild of Assistant Professor Hisham Ali, and construction should wrap up in 2024. Now that’s fast.

Image: Hisham Ali

Shadowy science

In the coming year, two eerie astronomical events are heading for North America: On Oct. 14, 2023, parts of the western U.S. will witness an annular, or “ring of fire,” solar eclipse. Then in April 2024, a total solar eclipse will similarly pass above swaths of Texas, Arkansas and more.

To celebrate these rare, and dark, events, the Fiske Planetarium has launched a series of videos and outreach activities called Science through Shadows. In addition to featuring eclipses, the program will explore the unique physics that scientists can explore during “occultations” and “transits”—or when one celestial body, like a moon or planet, passes in front of another, like a star, briefly blocking out its light. The project is led by Douglas Duncan, professor emeritus of astrophysical and planetary sciences, and John Keller, director of Fiske.

“There is science that can be done during eclipses, occultations and transits,” Keller said. “One technique for discovering planets in other systems is by detecting them as they transit in front of stars."

CubeSats galore

Little satellites. Big science.

In the coming year or more, scientists at CU �鶹ӰԺ are scheduled to launch four CubeSats into space. These petite spacecraft are no bigger than a toaster oven but will collect scientific data that far outstrip their size. They include Climatology of Anthropogenic and Natural VLF wave Activity in Space (CANVAS) led by Robert Marshall, associate professor of aerospace engineering. CANVAS will orbit Earth, tracking the bursts of energy that fly into space when lightning strikes—which happens a whopping 50 times per second on our planet.

Learn more about CANVAS and these other, upcoming CubeSat missions: AEPEX, MAXWELL and SPRITE.

Image: Artist's depiction of the Supernova Remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat. (Credit: LASP)

Flagship launch

In October 2024, Colorado’s big year in space is scheduled to end with a bang—a literal one—as NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This flagship mission will carry with it a roughly $50 million instrument called the SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA) designed and built at LASP.

They’re going on a long journey: Europa Clipper will travel nearly 2 billion miles to Jupiter and its moon Europa—a body about the size of Earth’s moon where a thick layer of ice surrounds a deep ocean. There, the mission will explore whether Europa harbors conditions that could support living organisms.

It’s a good beginning for CU �鶹ӰԺ’s next 75 years of space exploration.

Image: SUDA in a cleanroom at LASP. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU �鶹ӰԺ)

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CU �鶹ӰԺ to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 16:29:45 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/14/2023 - 10:29

Jeff Zehnder

Above: Sanghamitra Neogi
Headline Video: Heat flow in nanoscale materials with confined dimensions.

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to revolutionize how manufacturers model and deal with heat in computers.

“Thermal challenges are very much known, but right now management of it is very trial and error,” Neogi said.

It is well documented that microchips and transistors fail due to heating challenges. Mitigation to this point has primarily been through bigger fans and cooling channels, but as chips have gotten smaller to pack in more processing power, heat has become a larger issue.

“With microelectronics, we are moving away from planar chips to 3D stacked chips because it makes memory and processing quicker, but you can’t cool the inner channels using regular methods because you don’t have the real estate. The current ideas don’t work very well,” Neogi said.

To find new solutions, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Neogi’s team a $1 million contract over 18 months to create an atomistic thermal model of microelectronic systems. In addition to CU �鶹ӰԺ, the team also includes Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin from the University of California, Berkeley and Prof. Kaushik Roy from Purdue University.

Neogi and her team will start by creating computational thermal model of individual transistors at the deeply scaled nanometer level, one millionth of a millimeter in size, and will then expand the model to a millimeter-scale circuit element with 300,000 transistors.

“We’re going to predict how the temperature map looks like; which zones are hot and which zones are cold. But most importantly, why certain zones are hot and cold,” she said.

Although the chips are extremely small, the modeling is a significant undertaking, requiring supercomputing resources, machine learning, and artificial intelligence Neogi said.

“Inclusion of AI at different length scales will be a major component of this research. Right now thermal modeling is very trial and error. We want to be able to instead predict how things will fail. If we are successful, we will have a new thermal approach not just for chips, but microelectronic circuits, sensors, devices. We are building a method that scales dramatically,” she said.

Although DARPA is interested in the research from a military application perspective, the work could also have broad applications across all electronic devices.

Neogi is especially excited about the project’s alignment with the federal CHIPS Act of 2022, which seeks to dramatically expand semiconductor research and development in the United States. Although her project is funded separately, the work is highly synced with CHIPS research.

“This is a fundamental thing that is at the heart of all electronics. Thermal challenges affect all of them at the very core,” she said.

The full title of the DARPA program is Thermal Modeling of Nanoscale Transistors (Thermonat). The contract officially begins August 14, 2023.

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat. An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to...

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Construction underway on plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 17:07:31 +0000

Construction underway on plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/27/2023 - 11:07

Jeff Zehnder

Hisham Ali

The sounds of construction permeate the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at the �鶹ӰԺ. The bang of hammers. The wail of electric saws. A new laboratory for a plasma wind tunnel is taking shape.

The project is the vision of Assistant Professor Hisham Ali. It will allow his team to study the conditions of atmospheric reentry, when a spacecraft returning to Earth can hit speeds of Mach 30 and experience temperatures in excess of 10,000 degrees Kelvin (17,540 degrees Fahrenheit).

The aerospace building is still new, having only been completed in 2019, but the research Ali hopes to conduct has special requirements that necessitate renovations. It has taken more than a year of preparation just to begin the construction.

“We’re building a novel system. It’s not a turnkey purchase, and determining all the requirements was challenging,” Ali said. “What do we need for this work? What equipment is necessary – vacuum pumps are required, but what models meet our performance needs? Then the specs go to an architect so they can do layout with an electrical engineer. Then we worked with a mechanical engineering contractor to determine how much extra cooling we need in the room. It’s very involved.”

Electricity is a particular demand. A major component of the project is a high-power radio frequency (RF) generator that can draw over 100 kilowatts during operation. That comes on top of three 30-kilowatt vacuum pumps and an air compressor and chilled water pump that utilize over 25 kilowatts. All of these items use more power on their own than the average U.S. household consumes at any time.

“What we’re doing here at CU �鶹ӰԺ is studying this high-temperature hypersonic plasma environment. To study how we interact with this plasma electromagnetically, we have to simulate these extreme conditions in our laboratory,” Ali said.

In addition to moving walls and adding new conduit and cooling lines, the construction crew must also reinforce the floor in the lab to accommodate a mezzanine structure that will hold more than 20,000 pounds of equipment.

Ali joined the aerospace faculty at CU �鶹ӰԺ in 2022. Since then, design for the laboratory has been his major focus. He is excited at the possibilities the lab present both for advancing science and as a teaching environment.

“Construction of this inside an academic building means we can integrate really well with the educational program, with student work and classes,” Ali said. “One of the advantages of an RF plasma facility is you can run the plasma jet for hours in a continuous fashion. We plan to do experiments as often as possible.”

Construction began on July 17. It should take a little more than six months to complete.

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Popular Mechanics interviews Boyd on hypersonic weapons tracking

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:11:54 +0000

Popular Mechanics interviews Boyd on hypersonic weapons tracking Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/29/2023 - 08:11

Iain Boyd was interviewed for a new article in Popular Mechanics on efforts to track hypersonic weapons.

At issue? Hypersonic weapons often travel at fast enough speeds to generate a sheath of plasma, which can obscure them to radar. Traditional missiles travel at comparably slower speeds and are much easier to monitor and potentially intercept midflight.

“It is only the very fastest hypersonic vehicles that create enough plasma for radar to be a consideration,” Boyd explains. Scramjet cruise missiles are “very fast and create a lot of energy, but they are not fast enough to create all those charged particles.”

Boyd, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is also the director of the CU �鶹ӰԺ Center for National Security Initiatives. He is a leading researcher in hypersonic aerothermodynamics.

Read the full article at Popular Mechanics

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Video: Computational Modeling of Hypersonic Flows

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 18:49:57 +0000

Video: Computational Modeling of Hypersonic Flows Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/22/2023 - 11:49

Robyn Macdonald is an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at CU �鶹ӰԺ. Her research interests include hypersonic flows, computation of chemically reacting flows, chemical kinetics, and radiation modeling. Her work has broad applications for hypersonic vehicles for space travel, national defense and other applications.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-gPrvkmXyw]

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Building a one-of-a-kind plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics at CU �鶹ӰԺ

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 22:25:01 +0000

Building a one-of-a-kind plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics at CU �鶹ӰԺ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/21/2023 - 15:25

Jeff Zehnder

Hisham Ali is pushing the limits of plasma physics and hypersonics in his lab on campus to advance a nationally important area of science and engineering.

Ali, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, studies magnetohydrodynamics. It is the investigation of the magnetic properties and behavior of electrically conducting fluids, such as the plasmas generated during extremely high-speed flight – a critical area for hypersonic vehicles.

“It’s fluid mechanics, plasma physics, fluids interacting electrically. We’re specifically looking at what happens when a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere. There is a tremendous need for funding hypersonic research as a nation,” Ali said.

Ali’s team is currently building a plasma wind tunnel, a highly complex undertaking to conduct experimental research of the conditions space vehicles experience during atmospheric reentry.

“We have a unique opportunity. These kinds of facilities don’t come online very often. We here at CU �鶹ӰԺ as well as others in the outside scientific and engineering community are very excited,” Ali said.

As he and his team endeavor to complete construction and begin experiments in the plasma wind tunnel, they are also conducting mission design and computational trajectory work.

“It’s modeling, mission design, and trajectory work for a Neptune plasma-assisted aerocapture probe in addition to the work on the wind tunnel. We’re very busy,” Ali said.

The work is a culmination of sorts for Ali. Growing up, he decided early to become an aerospace engineer, but despite excelling in science and math it was not a sure thing.

“My parents emigrated from Sudan when I was a year old. They had earned doctorates in Sudan in veterinary medicine, but that didn’t carry over to the United States and they had to re-enroll in graduate school here. Both of my parents worked nights and weekends in fast food to support us for most of the 1990s while they completed their studies. When I earned scholarships to go to college, it was very helpful to us,” Ali said.

He successfully earned the National Achievement Scholarship, a college fellowship designed to increase opportunities for Black students. Ali said as an honor intended for specific groups, there were some challenges.

“People said it wasn’t fair because they thought the bar was lower for the Achievement Scholarship compared to the National Merit Scholarship,” Ali said. “They’re both very competitive, and then I also received the National Merit Scholarship. There’s sometimes a perception you’re not as good.”

He then attended the University of Alabama and participated in internships at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville. Ali enjoyed research, but was not sure if graduate school was for him.

“Thankfully, the people I knew at NASA encouraged me to apply to graduate school and to NASA graduate fellowships,” Ali said. “I also had a very supportive undergraduate research advisor at the University of Alabama. They told me I was good enough.”

Ali went on to Georgia Tech, where he earned his master’s and PhD in aerospace engineering and met his wife, who has a PhD of her own in biomedical engineering. They then came to Colorado so she could earn another doctorate in medicine at the CU Anschutz Campus. Ali worked for the Aerospace Corporation in Colorado Springs for a year before officially joining CU �鶹ӰԺ in 2022.

Ali said he also hopes to enhance the environment for other budding Black engineers during his time on campus and in the department.

“I had mentors who happened to be Black who said there’s a place for you. Not only is this for you, you’re needed here. I want to do that for others,” Ali said.

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