In the three years since he joined NASA as a research engineer, 29-year-old Manan Vyas has accomplished two major technical feats in the highly challenging area of aeronautics.

One will allow for more realistic and effective flight testing of space vehicles and high-speed aircraft, both for military and passenger use. The other will help the U.S. Air Force retest a hypersonic engine that previously failed to ignite and propel an experimental aircraft, a critical step toward advancing the technology.

(Sam Kittner/Kittner.com)

Vyas work comes in the field of hypersonic propulsionthat is, speeds several times faster than the speed of sound. It is a souped-up version of supersonic propulsionanything above the speed of soundthe 20th-century innovation that thrilled the world with the launch of the Concorde passenger jet that could fly from New York to Paris in less than 3.5 hours. Hypersonic propulsion is considered the final frontier of aeronautics because of the huge technical difficulties that need to be solved.

The team that Vyas works with at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland designs different types of hypersonic-propulsion systems, brings them into wind tunnels and tweaks them as necessary. When developing new technologies, simulations are a critical tool to help understand and predict how the test conditions may be different from actual flight.

Vyas first achievement verified what many in the field had long suspectedthat the airflow in the wind tunnels that are used to replicate flight conditions has a chemical composition different from actual atmospheric conditions and leads to different combustion processes. In technical terms, he performed complex simulations using computational fluid dynamics and sophisticated chemistry, turbulence and heat-transfer models.

His investigation produced first-of-their-kind results and underscored that significant care must be taken when replicating flight conditions in wind tunnels and testing supersonic combustion.

Manans work has helped us understand the differences between actual flight and the simulated environment, which before his work was unknown, said Dhanireddy Reddy, chief of NASAs Aeropropulsion Division. He has only been out of school for three years and has made significant contributions to NASA Glenn.

Jih-Fen Lei, director of NASAs Research and Technology Directorate agreed. Without his work, we would not have the confidence we need.

High-speed flight has implications far in the future for reusable space vehicles, long-distance cruise missiles, greatly reduced travel times for passenger jets, and other military and civilian applications, said George Schmidt, deputy director of NASAs Research and Technology Directorate. Researchers predict that use of the new technology could allow the 18-hour trip from New York to Tokyo to be reduced to two hours in airplanes reaching 15 times the speed of sound.

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NASA engineer helps advance hypersonic flight