Alex Craig
The University of Arizona
Seminar Information
Engineering Building Unit 2 (EBU2)
Room 479
Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@ucsd.edu)
High-speed aircraft are subject to intense aerodynamic heating, which drive many design decisions. Laminar-turbulent transition is a key driver in heating rates, but is challenging to model, resulting in substantial uncertainty in predicting heating rates on high-speed vehicles. Recent efforts to address two key experimental challenges are addressed. First, recent efforts to improve the measurement of quantitative heat flux on wind tunnel models with quantified uncertainty are addressed, particularly on low-cost 3D printed models. Second, recent progress in studying the impact of nose bluntness on boundary-layer transition are discussed.
Prof. Alex Craig is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A., where he has worked since 2016 and leads an experimental wind tunnel facility. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Texas A\&M University in 2015. His interests include both basic and applied research and have focused on the physics of boundary-layer stability and laminar-turbulent transition in high-speed flows, aerodynamic heating, and improving measurement techniques. He is an Associate Fellow of the Aemerican Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was previously a member of its Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee.