Sandia National Labs Academic Alliance Collaboration Report 2020-2021

CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLGHT

Karen Willcox

Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute and a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UT Austin. Her research has produced scalable computational methods for the design of next- generation engineered systems, with a particular focus on model from data. These methods are widely applied in aircraft system design and environmental policy decision-making. Willcox is on the committee for Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences, an intensive academic and research career workshop series for women graduate students and postdocs co-organized by Sandia and UT Austin’s Oden Institute. reduction as a way to learn principled approximations

the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin, providing expertise on ROM. The work was also supported by Samuel Majors, a UT Austin graduate student who set up interfaces with OpenFOAM, an open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver with hypersonic capabilities. Because of that project, a major collaboration opportunity emerged in 2020 when UT Austin was selected by NASA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to lead three other universities in a project to redefine sensing and analysis of hypersonic vehicles. The goal of the three-year, $3.3 million Full Airframe Sensing Technology (FAST) project is to create a new paradigm in sensing for hypersonic vehicles, which could also be applied to lower-speed craft. They are evaluating vehicles for aerodynamic changes during flight tests and using that information to infer where force is being applied so they can better protect and control them during flight. Sandia will be providing expertise in the area of air flow simulations around the hypersonic vehicles.

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2020-2021 Collaboration Report

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