Britton Olson

There exist many exciting applications, both in science and engineering, where turbulent fluid flow interacts with shock waves; from shock-boundary layer interactions of turbo-machinery to the medical application of shock wave lithotripsy. Inertial Confinement Fusion uses an imploding beryllium capsule, which involves Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability amidst spherical shock waves. RT driven turbulence has also been found to be the main mechanism for accelerating the thermo-nuclear flames of type 1a supernovae. Recent research has shown that Rayleigh-Taylor instability can cause the formation of shock waves.

My present research seeks to generally address the problem of shock-turbulence interactions by considering the current "state-of-art" methods for modeling these phenomena that have recently been developed at Universities and National Labs. I'm interested in utilizing these methods to study wall bounded flows such as rocket nozzle flow. In this case, flow separation causes a shock to fluctuate at the wall and induce side loads on the nozzle, posing a classical design constraint on nozzles. For all of the aforementioned problem types, it is necessary to utilize massive computational resources for the simulations, in order to reveal novel and new insights about physics and engineering.

B. J. Olson, A. W. Cook, "Rayleigh-Taylor shock waves," Phys. Fluids 19, 128108 (2007).