Overarching Goal of the Center

The overarching goal of the Center is to predict the performance of hypersonic air-breathing vehicles using computational methods.

In particular, the Center will focus on off-design conditions to identify and characterize the operability limits of the propulsion system and, specifically, the failure modes associated with engine unstart.

The objective of the Center's research is to build a "mixed fidelity" and multidisciplinary computational infrastructure of this complex and highly integrated engineering system.

The initial objective is to predict the performance of the Hyshot vehicle flown by the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2004. The flight trajectory is illustrated in the picture below and the simulations will attempt to reproduce the hypersonic flow and engine performance during the last phase of the flight.

Fundamental components of the Center's research are:

• Code development and deployment
• Numerical analysis and algorithms
• Physical modeling
• Large scale computing
• Verification and validation
• Uncertainty quantification methodology

The Center is largely devoted to computational activities, but four fundamental experiments will also be carried out at Stanford to complement the physical modeling efforts and provide validation data. Finally, thanks to a strong collaboration with the Computer Science Department at Stanford, the Center will be involved in the development of computational tools for future many-core computer architectures.