MMAE Seminar Series: Douglas Carter

The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering presents their spring 2024 seminar series featuring guest speaker Douglas Carter, a postdoctoral appointee at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who will give a presentation on “Turbulence Experiments at Low and High Speeds.” This seminar is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, February 28, 2024, from 3:30–4:30 p.m. in room 104 of the Rettaliata Engineering Center.

Abstract

In this talk, I will present results of three very different experimental measurement campaigns aimed at tackling distinct challenges in turbulent systems. The first study involves the construction of the largest zero-mean turbulence box facility built to date featuring 256 individually actuated air jets on two facing planar arrays. The jets are randomly actuated to create a large region of homogeneous turbulence in the center with controllable turbulence kinetic energy dissipation rates. Planar particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements in the center of the box will be presented and features of the facility will be discussed. The second study uses stitched time-resolved planar PIV in a water-channel facility surrounding a stalled NACA-0012 airfoil at a chord-based Reynolds number Re = 7.1 x 10⁴. Using planar pressure reconstruction and a data-driven framework, the structures in the velocity fields are correlated to the instances of greatest dipole noise generation via Curle’s acoustic analogy. Consequences for noise generation and mitigation will be discussed. In the third study, I will present results from measurements in the Sandia Hypersonic Wind Tunnel (HWT) facility, where simple quantities such as the free-stream velocity remain difficult to measure with precision. A variation of femtosecond laser electronic excitation tagging (FLEET) aimed at quantifying the freestream velocity will be presented. 

Bio

Douglas W. Carter earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of New Hampshire in 2014 before attending the University of Minnesota where he earned his master’s and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and mechanics in 2017 and 2019, respectively. From 2019–2022 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom before moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico as a postdoctoral appointee at Sandia National Laboratories. His work encompasses the use of state-of-the-art measurement techniques and data-driven analysis to address challenges in single and multi-phase turbulent flows at high and low speeds.