The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering invites you to attend the talk 
 

"Construction of Non-Equilibrium Hydrodynamic Models for Atmospheric Entry Plasmas"

by

Dr. Marco Panesi

Associate Professor | University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Tuesday, January 28
11 am - 12 pm
MK 317

About the Talk: 
The simulation of the aerothermal environment surrounding vehicles moving at hypersonic speed is a complex problem due to its multi-physics and multi-scale nature. Progress in the ability to ac-curately model these systems has been hindered by the lack of reliable physical and chemical models for collisional and radiative processes. Furthermore, the predictive capabilities of these models are often established by a simple comparison of the model predictions against results from legacy exper-imental measurements, the accuracy of which is often not well characterized. Substantial progress in the area of computational chemistry, along with increased computational resources, have allowed for the construction of realistic models based on molecular-scale dynamics. I propose to use state-specific collisional radiative models as a powerful tool to derive macroscopic conservation equations, energy exchange terms and chemical production rates for atmospheric entry plasmas. I will cover the key aspects involved in model development, namely: (1) using ab-initio quantum calculations as a powerful tool to construct high-fidelity physics-based models; (2) defining reduced-order mod-els for the simulation of 2D and 3D flows (e.g., coarse-grain modeling); (3) validating physical models and determining the uncertainty in their predictive capabilities, based on the most recent developments in Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) algorithms.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Marco Panesi is currently Associate Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department and director of the Center for Hypersonics and Entry System Studies (CHESS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His research interests include hypersonics aerothermodynamics, plasma dynamics and uncertainty quantification. In 2009, he received the Ph.D. degree from the von K´arm´an Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium for his work on “Physical models for non-equilibrium plasma flow simulations at high speed re-entry conditions”. He completed a post-doc with the PECOS center, one of the five DOE funded PSAAP centers, at the Institute for Computa-tional Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin. Prof. Panesi joined the faculty in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in August 2012.

Prof. Panesi has won a number of awards, including the Young Investigator Program award from AFOSR and the Early Career Faculty award from NASA. He has won Best Paper/Presentation Awards at AIAA conferences a number of times. In 2015, he received the Award on Physical Modelling at the Symposium on Aerothermodynamics for Space Vehicles (ESA) for his contribution to the fundamentals of Aerothermodynamics.