Modeling Hypersonic Flight

Parviz Moin, a mechanical engineer, discusses a multiyear collaboration among Stanford University engineering departments that uses some of the world's fastest supercomputers to model the complexities of hypersonic flight. Their work may lead to planes that fly at many times the speed of sound.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] Stanford University what you see here is the hydrogen fuel is being injected and there is a supersonic air that is bending it what we are trying to do in this program is to develop numerical algorithms physical models to be able to accurately represent what happens in an actual physical situation here what

00:00:28 we're looking at is a classic problem in fluid mechanics the transition from the quiet state to turbulent State air around the vehicles flow in the atmosphere Oceanic currents Rivers aerodynamics of aircraft missiles submarines they all end up to be in the regime of turbulent flows what you're looking at here is temperature fluctuations in the exhaust jet of jet

00:00:53 engine the reason we can do these kind of calculations is advances in computer science this calculation probably one of the largest if not the largest engineering calculations ever undertaken it was run on 160,000 processors simultaneously and it took four days these three-dimensional simulations they're really like a fantastic microscope allow you to go

00:01:17 look at every detail understanding and being able to predict this phenomena have been one of the big challenges it's not one number or two numbers that come out of it at the end of the day it is all of these structures that you see back there the richness of it it is understanding that allows you to control reduce pollution improve fuel consumption understand noise all of

00:01:40 these have to do with fluid Mechanics for more please visit us at stanford.edu