Logan Riley and Datta Gaitonde Receive a 2014 AFRL/DAGSI Fellowship Award

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Aerospace engineering graduate student Logan Riley and Professor Datta Gaitonde have been awarded an Air Force Research Laboratory/Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute (AFRL/DAGSI) Student-Faculty Research Fellowship. Their research, titled "Time Accurate CFD Simulations of Scramjet Engines for Control System Development," falls in the Aerospace Systems Directorate category of funded projects for 2014.

Hypersonic flight holds great promise for rapidly transporting people and materiel from one part of the earth to another, as well as to reduce the cost of access to space. Mr. Riley and Prof. Gaitonde will be using supercomputers to examine the dynamics of an advanced type of hypersonic air-breathing propulsive engine known as a scramjet (Supersonic Combustion Ramjet). Conventional engines slow down ingested air to subsonic speeds before injecting and burning fuel. This technique becomes ineffective at speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound because of severe losses that occur in the process of slowing down the air. A better approach is to try and accomplish fuel burning and mixing at supersonic speeds. This introduces new challenges however since it becomes necessary to mix and burn fuel in milliseconds in air that is flowing faster than the speed of sound. The team will use massively parallel systems operated by the Department of Defense to perform three-dimensional, time-accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The results will help understand large-scale events, such as transition from ramjet to scramjet or catastrophic engine unstart. Prof. Gaitonde, who is the John Glenn Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an Ohio Research Scholar, directs the High-Fidelity Computational Multi-Physics Lab.

More about AFRL/DAGSI
The AFRL/DAGSI Ohio Student-Faculty Research Fellowship program, funded through DAGSI by the Ohio Board of Regents, supports graduate science and engineering students and faculty who conduct research in areas targeted by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The key objectives of the program are to strengthen AFRL research ties to Ohio's academic science and engineering community, stimulate effective collaboration between Ohio universities and the AFRL, leverage Ohio research funding through use of AFRL resources and to develop research talent to fulfill future AFRL and Ohio's Third Frontier workforce needs.
 

 

Categories: GraduateFaculty