Hypersonic Turbulence and Drop Aerobreakup/Impact

ABSTRACT

Aerodynamic drag and heat transfer must be accurately predicted to design a high-speed vehicle. To do so requires a physical understanding of supersonic/hypersonic turbulence and, relating to weather encounter, multiphase flow physics. The first part of the talk will discuss efforts to obtain data to support Morkovin’s hypothesis, which is foundational to our understanding of high-speed turbulence. It states that “we can expect with confidence that the essential dynamics of these supersonic shear flows will follow the incompressible pattern.” We will present new data supporting this hypothesis at Mach 6. In the second part of the talk, we will present new aerobreakup data that were obtained by observing the flow about a hypersonic, railgun-launched projectile as it processed an ultrasonically levitated water drop. Linear- and nonlinear-stability analyses were made, and the results are compared to computations.

BIOGRAPHY

Nick Parziale is the George Meade Bond Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he has been a faculty member since 2013. He earned his Ph.D. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 2013. His group’s research focuses on supersonic and hypersonic aerodynamics, including boundary-layer instability, turbulence, and reacting/multiphase flows, including aerobreakup and impact. Nick’s group has been recognized with the AFOSR (2016) and ONR (2020) Young Investigator Program awards, four Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowships (2014-2017), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2024, and the AIAA Aerodynamic Measurement Technology Innovation Award in 2026.