NASA Internship

at Glenn Research Center

Check Out my Final Presentation

Supersonic Jet Inlets

Over the summer at NASA I focused on supersonic jet inlets (Pitot, axisymmetric mixed-compression spike inlets, and streamline-traced) and built a clean, repeatable CFD pipeline. I wired SUPIN → ESP → S2S → Vulcan so I could go from parametric inlet definitions to CAD (.csm → ESP) to adaptive meshes and finally to flow solutions. Using S2S, I started with a coarse grid and iterated to higher complexity, so shocks and boundary layers were automatically resolved; then I ran Vulcan on the adapted meshes. I validated my workflow against Wind-US solutions and used AIP (Aerodynamic interface Plane) metrics such as Pressure Recovery and Distortion to compare designs and backpressure settings. I also mapped how moves the normal shock. I showed how backpressuring shifts the pressure rise upstream and noted that ramp bleed would mitigate distortion.

Workflow with its individual components

Reacting Flow Case

In parallel to my work on supersonic inlets, I reproduced the Burrows and Kurkov reacting-flow case to get fluent with high-speed combustion in Vulcan. The goal was to get acquainted with simulations of reacting flows and to create a workflow to use to validate reacting flow simulations on future versions of Vulcan. To validate the model, I would compare the results against a simulation of the B-K case performed on Wind-US (see this link for more details on this study). I simulated hydrogen in vitiated air (≈25% water vapor) at supersonic conditions, matched the turbulent/laminar Prandtl and Schmidt numbers used in prior Wind-US runs, and compared flame structure, temperature, and species mass fractions across several chemistry models.