J. William Bell

The three-pronged attack has always been a staple of military planning--sometimes ending in victory, sometimes in disaster. The Soviet Union used the tactic to great effect in Europe at the close of World War II. George Custer and his men, on the other hand, didn't fare so well on the plains of Montana in 1876.

For an international group of aerospace engineers using NCSA computing resources, there's no Little Bighorn in sight. The team is making a successful attack on Mach reflections, unusual high-speed airflows that are a bane to airplane designers. They have found that lasers can diminish or eradicate these confounding events when they crop up in the inlets at the front of supersonic engines.

Two members of the team, Hong Yan of Rutgers University and Dmitry Khotyanovsky of the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM), are running calculations on NCSA's Platinum cluster. Though they are modeling identical systems, Yan and Khotyanovsky use different codes to get the job done. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Gregory Elliott represents the third prong in the team's battle plan and conducts experiments on the system in a wind tunnel.

"It is critical to make sure that our final results are not a numerical artifact caused by the influence of...errors present in any [particular] shock-capturing scheme," Khotyanovsky says. "The cross comparison of our results gives us confidence."

Access Online | Posted 4-6-2004

Pressure contours in the simulated airflow 20, 40, 60, and 80 milliseconds after the laser pulse is introduced.
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