Bodony participant in three new hypersonics research projects

Aerospace engineering Professor Daniel J. Bodony is on the research leadership teams for recently funded projects from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics.

“Unsteady, high-speed aerodynamic flows in hypersonic flight systems generate large amplitude thermo-mechanical loads on the underlying structure, causing it to dynamically respond and modify the original flow field,” Bodony said. “The Air Force Office of Scientific Research funded a project to study the fluid-thermal-structural interaction that occurs when a fin-generated oblique shock from a Mach 6-10 flow grazes a flat metallic panel embedded within an otherwise rigid fixture.”

Bodony said experiments will be conducted in the University of Maryland high-temperature Ludwieg tube using focused schlieren, photogrammetry, and pressure and temperature sensitive paints to measure the unsteady aerodynamics and the dynamic panel response over a range of Mach numbers, Reynolds numbers, and panel thicknesses.

“We’ll also develop a fiber-optic technique to measure the panel dynamic thermo-mechanical response,” Bodony said.

The NSF project includes Bodony and his group in the Center for Hypersonic and Entry Systems Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“We’ll conduct multiphysics simulations of hypersonic vehicle systems, toward a simulation of the entire vehicle,” Bodony said. “The simulations seek to couple several domain-specific codes, such as computational fluid dynamics, radiation transport, thermo-structural response, and ablation, into a coordinated, event-driven framework suitable for next-generation supercomputers to be deployed by the NSF in their Leadership Class Computing Facility at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.”

Rob Chiodi, Bodony’s postdoctoral research associate, and Blaine Vollmer, his Ph.D. student, will develop and utilize the coordination framework and conduct the simulations. 

The project funded by UCAH will design and test a prototype system that extends the capabilities of scramjet propulsion by enhancing its operational robustness, and substantially expanding its operational range, through distributed plasma actuation.

“This will be demonstrated in a continuous running scramjet engine located in the Notre Dame Turbomachinery Laboratory,” Bodony said. “It will utilize an active control system based on patterned electrical energy deposition that has been demonstrated to effectively control an isolator shock train and to extend combustion stability by more than a factor of two.”

Bodony said the goal is to optimize the isolator and combustor performance for a broad range of conditions that are representative of off-design flight operation, including extreme transient maneuvers.

“The project will involve a combination of high-fidelity simulations, including the effects of the electric energy deposition, and experimental validation. The validated simulation will ultimately be used to design full-scale systems,” he said.

This project includes a team of faculty and graduate students at UIUC and the University of Notre Dame, as well as research scientists with Department of Defense prime contractors Aerojet Rocketdyne and Lockheed Martin, and a minority-owned small business, FGC-Plasma.