The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) has granted three A&A graduate students with Aerospace Career Enhancement (ACE) Fellowships. Nithin Adidela, Jared Smythe and Eddie Ting will receive support for their research and tuition assistance.

Nithin Adidela

Nithin Adidela, a researcher in A&A’s Computational Fluid Mechanics Lab, is optimizing a code that enables researchers in his lab to simulate aerospace problems at an accelerated rate, enhancing the performance of the Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) code through the implementation of GPU parallelization techniques. This code facilitates the simulation of multi-phase problems, particularly focusing on droplet-laden isotropic turbulence, which investigates the interaction between turbulence and droplets. The presence of droplets significantly affects the performance and efficiency of aerospace applications such as airplane propulsion systems. Understanding the behavior of droplet-laden turbulence is essential for optimizing the design and operation of these systems, improving safety, and reducing energy consumption.

Jared Smythe

Jared Smythe, a researcher in A&A’s Flow Z-Pinch Lab, is using a combination of schlieren imaging and digital holography interferometry (DHI) to better characterize the behavior of plasma waves in the ZaP-HD experiment to advance energy from fusion. The schlieren imaging will allow for a broad, qualitative view of the waves in the assembly region of a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch. Jared’s research will aim to uncover regions of interest where important wave interaction phenomena may be occurring. He will then use DHI to hone in on these regions to give quantitative measurements of density and temperature of the plasma. Any appropriate changes to electrode geometry will then be identified in an attempt to optimize pinch performance.

Eddie Ting

Eddie Ting, a researcher in A&A’s Active Aeroelastic Structures Lab, is researching how long-range commercial supersonic aircraft geometries affect the handling qualities, dynamics, stability, and control at low speeds, as most of the supersonic commercial aircraft designs investigated to date have been optimized at cruise conditions, and often neglect the low-speed impact on their takeoff, approach, and landing characteristics. Such configurations can become quite nonlinear aerodynamically at relatively low angles of attack, making it important to investigate this nonlinear behavior from a flight safety perspective. Eddie’s work focuses on data reduction and system identification of both linear and nonlinear behavior as a function of configuration geometries, control surface deflections, and flight conditions and uses the resulting models for control studies.