Panesi Selected as AFOSR Young Investigator to Model Hypersonic Flight

2/17/2015 Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

Assistant Prof. Marco Panesi's work in modeling high-speed flight has earned a Young Investigator Award.

Written by Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

AE Assistant Prof. Marco Panesi
AE Assistant Prof. Marco Panesi
AE Assistant Prof. Marco Panesi
Improved modeling for non-equilibrium chemical reactions occurring during high-speed flight has become the defining theme for the research program of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Assistant Prof. Marco Panesi.

“The premise of this research is to devise new governing equations for fluid dynamics of chemical reacting environments,” Panesi said. His most recent research project, entitled “A Reduced-order Modeling Approach to Enable Kinetic Simulations of Non-equilibrium Hypersonic Flows,” has been selected for the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award.

Vehicles traveling at very high speeds are subject to extraordinarily high temperatures, in the tens of thousands of degrees. “The fundamental idea is that the hot gas impinges on the vehicle, which causes elevated heating,” Panesi said. “We need to simulate these flows so that (engineers) can determine the peak heating and design materials and thermal protection systems capable of withstanding this extreme environment.”

While some approximate models are currently employed for design efforts, Panesi explains that they are mostly phenomenological in nature. These models were generally constructed from legacy experiments (performed in the 1950s and 1960s), because computational resources were limited at the time.

Current models are stretched far beyond their limits of applicability, so Panesi plans to “lead the development of new models that are constructed from first-principles physics-based information. We now have access to unprecedented amounts of information thanks to new chemical databases formulated from ab initio quantum mechanics calculations,” he said.  “These databases enable researchers to construct improved physical models for use in a variety of engineering applications.”

Current high-speed aircraft most likely are over-designed, Panesi believes. “Engineers are forced to design heavier heat shields because of the large uncertainty associated with current heat load predictions. This impacts the entire design of the vehicle; these new physics-based models promise to transform the paradigm for hypersonic vehicle design.”
 


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This story was published February 17, 2015.