Current Projects

Enabling Rapid Flight Integration of Advanced Hypersonic Thermal Protection System Materials

  • Goal: Develop the scientific underpinning needed to reliably, rapidly, and accurately assess the performance of advanced thermal protection systems (TPS) in hypersonic flight. If successful, reduce the pre-qualification design integration time from about five years to six months, enabling new material solutions that can rapidly impact current national security hypersonic missions.
  • Sandia Collaborators (selected): Justin Wagner (PI), Jonathan Murray, John Tencer, Jacob Needels, Alejandro Diaz, Sean Babiniec, Kanad Khanna, David Ching, Emily Dreyer, Ross Wagnild
  • Research topics: nonlinear model reduction; surrogate modeling; thermal and ablation modeling; coupled Aerothermal simulations
  • Funding source: Sandia National Laboratories’ Grand Challenge Laboratory Directed Research and Development

Reduced-Order Model Enabled Multifidelity Uncertainty Quantification (PI)

  • Goal: This project will explore the utilization of reduced-order models (ROMs) in tandem with more expensive reference models for forward uncertainty quantification, optimizing the allocation of computational resources while ensuring that bias and variance are rigorously managed, mitigating the risk of reliance on surrogates beyond their regime of validity. In particular, we will develop multifidelity approaches that can train and tune ROMs on-the-fly and evaluate performance on Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes solvers for reentry applications.
  • Sandia Collaborators: Eric Parish, David Ching, Gianluca Geraci, Michael Eldred, Anthony Gruber, Greg Weirs
  • External Collaborator: Francesco Rizzi (NexGen, Pressio lead developer)
  • Research topics: nonlinear model reduction; Multifidelity Uncertainty Quantification; high performance computing
  • Funding source: Sandia National Laboratories’ Advanced Simulation and Computing Verification and Validation program.