Category: students

first void collapse papers out

Experimental and simulated XPCI of void collapse
Figure 6 from Hodge et al., comparing the experimental XPCI images with simulated ones.

Our collaborator, Arianna Gleason (SLAC), has been leading a campaign on ultrafast imaging of the collapse of small voids. Small voids are found as material defects in ablator layer of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets, and they hydrodynamically interfere with the convergence of the target so the fuel doesn’t get up to the desired pressure and density. However, since it happens so fast, it’s really hard to see this shock-void interaction detail — enter LCLS + ultrafast x-ray imaging.

The campaign just produced its first papers: Silvia Pandolfi, a postdoc at Stanford, just published a paper on the target fab process for the campaign (Review of Scientific Instruments), and Daniel Hodge, a grad student at BYU, just published a paper about the imaging and the post-processing (Optics Express). Congrats to them both! You can find Kelin’s xRAGE simulations and synthetic PCI images in Daniel’s paper.

Nitish wins a Horton Fellowship

nitish acharyaThe Frank J. Horton Graduate Research Fellowships are awarded to U of R students whose research supports the program at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Nitish has been working with Hussein and myself on a number of high energy density flow problems, and is PI on a pilot experimental campaign on OMEGA-EP to measure viscosity in fused silica. He also recently published a paper on shock-particle interactions on a stiff-gas method to approximate solid-like resistance of compressible particles, since material strength models are difficult to implement in rad-hydro codes. Well-deserved for Nitish. Congrats!

congratulations to our graduating seniors

A fond farewell and best wishes to our seniors, Umar, Savannah, and Charles, as they take on the next stage of their careers! Umar and Charles are heading to gainful employment, at Applied Materials and ASML, respectively. Savannah is headed to Boston, starting a PhD in MechE at Boston University. It certainly hasn’t been easy, with so much of their undergraduate experience marked by COVID, but they persevered. Come back and say hello during Mel Weekend sometime, but also send me a postcard to decorate my bulletin board.

Also, a belated congratulations to alumni Caroline Cardinale ’21 at Caltech, who recently won a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

If you haven’t noticed, I started a Google Maps over on the People page to keep track of where our alumni go. If you have an update, please message me!

scholarships and fellowships

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Amidst the COVID crisis, we have some good news — Caroline Cardinale ’20, who has been with our lab group for a while, won an Astronaut Scholarship, given to juniors and seniors in STEM who intend to pursue research in higher education. This year, 56 scholarships were awarded nationwide. The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation was founded by the Mercury 7 astronauts, the very first — a wonderful legacy beyond their already historical contributions. Leo Liu ’19, who is starting his second year as a PhD student at University of Virginia with Dan Quinn, won a Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Ph.D. Fellowship to continue his research on batoid-inspired hydrodynamics. We’re very proud of our current and past students!

 

comings and goings

Summer brings changes. Congratulations to Deok-Hoon, Jack, and Leo on graduating from our Mechanical Engineering program! Deok-Hoon and Leo will be joining PhD programs at UC-Santa Barbara and University of Virginia in the fall, respectively. We’ll be seeing them at future APS DFD meetings, most likely! Jack is joining the workforce at L3 Harris Technologies.

We’re sad to see them leave the nest, but a hearty welcome to Nitish and Brennen, who successfully completed their first year of graduate school, and sweated through first-year exams. Now they get to dive deep into research… the fun part!

 

Caroline’s NREIP internship

Caroline secured an internship with the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP), a summer internship program that places college students in research positions at Navy labs. Caroline decided to choose a position at NSWC-Indian Head. While she has been working in the Hydro Lab on making small amphibious devices work in both static and dynamic environments, for her summer internship, she will try her hand at computation related to detonation physics.

Amro and Deok-Hoon going to NCUR19

Amro and Deok-Hoon have been working on fabricating a small-scale, collapsible wind turbine, with the aim to optimize an array of them using machine learning. They took the initiative to write an abstract for NCUR2019 (National Conference on Undergraduate Research), which was accepted for a poster presentation (yay!) , so they will be heading to Kennesaw State in April. Sounds warm compared to Rochester!