Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

Director: Prof. S. H. Frankel

Prof. Frankel

Academic Background

Professor Frankel received his B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in May 1988. He spent the summer of 1988 as an intern at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium where he worked on turbulence modeling and CFD. He received his M.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the North Carolina State University in May 1990 where he worked under Dr. H.A. Hassan on assumed probability density function methods for modeling supersonic combustion in scramjet engines. During his M.S. he spent summers at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in the Theoretical Flow Physics Branch under Dr. Phil Drummond. He returned to SUNY at Buffalo in August 1990 and received his Ph.D. in May of 1993 where, as a visiting lecturer, he worked on direct numerical simulation (DNS), large eddy simulation (LES), and probability density function (PDF) methods for turbulent reacting flows under Dr. Peyman Givi. In August of 1993 he joined the faculty of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University , West Lafayette, Indiana as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in August 1999 and to Professor in August 2004.

Research Interests

His research interests include modeling and simulation of turbulent flows with an emphasis on the development and application of LES to turbulent reacting flows, aeroacoustics, multiphase, and biological flows. His most recent activities have focused on high-order numerical methods and subgrid-scale modeling of incompressible homogeneous and fully turbulent flows. The above movie, a real classic, is related to LES of turbulent flames involving the further development and application of the filtered mass density function approach (animation above is for jet mixing highlighting the Eulerian simulation of vortical structure and the Lagrangian Monte Carlo simulation of composition mixing - flame simulations with detailed chemistry are currently underway - stay tuned for the exciting results!). The movie should run faster after the first time through.

Some previous and current applications over the past few years we have been working on:

Journal publications related to the above can be found PAPERS. Updated!

A list of former and current graduate students can be found STUDENTS.

Some photos of past and present CFDLers PHOTOS Updated!

Most of the above simulations involve the use of high-order finite-difference, spectral, or spectral/finite-element in-house or government research codes and employ the use of domain decomposition and the message passing interface (MPI) library for interprocessor communication for parallel computing on multi-processor Linux or other clusters. Our lab has two Intel dual-core (32 processors) and quad-core (72 processors) clusters named robusta and supremo, respectively. In addition, we have two dual-quad core AMD Opteron machine named amaretto and cortado. Our most recent machine, as of 2012, is a 64 core machine named americano. Other commercial software currently used by students in Prof. Frankel's group include: FLUENT , AcuSolve.

If are interested in any of the above topics for any reason at all please do not hesitate to contact me at: frankel@purdue.edu

Teaching

Contact Me

585 Purdue Mall, Mechanical Engineering Building, Room 125, West Lafayette, IN 47907, Phone: (765)-494-1507, Fax: (765)-494-0530

Email: frankel@purdue.edu