Ivan Bermejo-Moreno
University of Southern California, CA·Engineering·Early-career
When aircraft, rockets and space probes fly faster than sound, the air flowing over them forms shock waves, which are abrupt jumps in pressure. Where a shock hits a thin, flexible panel on the vehicle's skin, the panel can vibrate, the airflow can become unsteady, and the surface can heat intensely.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
compressible turbulence
shock-wave/boundary-layer interaction
fluid-structure interaction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Characterize how compression waves amplify the length and time scales of separated turbulent flow over thin flexible panels, using high-fidelity coupled fluid-structure simulations.
- Quantify energy transfer between the turbulent flow, compression and expansion waves, and the panel, and how wall deformation and flow unsteadiness synchronize and sustain each other.
- Determine how heated or cooled walls stabilize or destabilize near-wall turbulence under realistic flow conditions and panel properties, using coupled flow, solid and thermal solvers.
- Identify how alternating instabilities such as longitudinal vortices and shear vortex shedding create spatial and temporal unevenness, moving from 2D to 3D simulations.
More about the research
Over time this can fatigue the structure and weaken control and engine performance. This project asks how turbulent airflow, compression and expansion waves, heat and flexing panels affect one another. Its approach combines computer simulation and theory.
Why it matters
Better predictions of how shocks, turbulence, heat and flexible panels interact could inform the design of safer, more efficient and more reliable high-speed vehicles. These include space launch systems, planetary probes, supersonic and hypersonic aircraft, rockets and supersonic combustion engines. The coupled simulation approach could also help other engineering fields that model fluids and structures together.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jane Bae
California Institute of Technology, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Analyze high-resolution flow data to determine how the directionality (anisotropy) of unresolved small-scale turbulent motion behaves in attached and separating flows near walls.
Shyam Menon
Louisiana State University, LA·Engineering·Early-career
Measure unsteady drag and heat transfer on single particles suddenly accelerated in a shock tube, using particle motion and temperature measurements to evaluate existing models.
Robert Guy
University of California-Davis, CA·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure flow patterns and forces on dynamically similar remotely operated vehicles to test how metachronal rowing, a back-to-front wave of paddle strokes, generates thrust and lift across paddle Reynolds numbers from 0.01 to 10,000.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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