SU² Contact

SU² User's Mailing List

Users are encouraged to join the SU² user's email list. This list will be used to communicate important information such as new releases and bug fixes. It will be used for answering questions in a public forum, and for forwarding information: the ability to reply or post to the list is disabled for non-developers. If you have comments, requests, or questions for the developers, please ask through the developer's mailing list below. To join, follow the link below, enter your email address, and follow the directions for confirmation. Your email address will not be shared or used for anything except email communication from the development team.

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SU² Developer's Mailing List and Forum at CFD Online

Users and outside developers of SU² who have questions not addressed in the User's Guide, Developer's Guide, or FAQs pages, can contact the SU² development team at:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/su2/

Also, if you are an external developer with additional features you would like to share with the community, have feature requests, or general comments on the implementation of the code, your feedback is appreciated.

SU² Development Team (Stanford University)

Juan J. Alonso

Associate Professor in the Aero/Astro department
Aerospace Design Laboratory (ADL) Director
Supervision of the overall SU² project

The work in our group is focused on research and development of new high-fidelity, multidisciplinary methods and techniques for the analysis and design of complex aerospace systems. The focus is on the development of the methods and their use in realistic test cases in order to assess their value. In the past, our research has involved transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic aircraft, helicopters, turbomachinery, and launch and re-entry vehicles.

Francisco Palacios

Engineering Research Associate in the Aero/Astro department
Lead Developer

The aim of my research is to develop a new paradigm of multi-disciplinary simulation and design that enables realizable eco-efficient aircraft. This radical change will be based in the development of complex multidisciplinary modeling techniques, superior algorithms (for simulation and design), and computational methods capable of real-time simulation. The envisioned breakthroughs in complex modeling and numerical methods will lead to a much more efficient design process, allowing for the full simulation of flight in real time, and the complete multidisciplinary design of advanced aircraft through the integration of design techniques based on control theory.

Karthik Duraisamy

Assistant Professor (Consulting) in the Aero/Astro department

My main contribution to the SU² suite is the development and application of transition models. I am working on correlation-based transport models of the Langtry-Menter type to be used in conjunction with the Spalart Allmaras and k-omega family of turbulence models. I am also very interested in discrete adjoint formulations with application to shape optimization and uncertainty quantification problems in aerodynamics, aeroacoustics and combustion.

Michael R. Colonno

Engineering Research Associate in the Aero/Astro department

My research interests with SU² surround supersonic aircraft, green aviation, launch vehicles, and rotorcraft. Recently, SU² has added a time-accurate adjoint formulation to its repertoire. This has enabled adjoint sensitivities to be used when optimizing systems for which the figure of merit is not constant, including rotorcraft applications in forward flight and launch vehicles for which the free stream conditions are rapidly changing. Supersonic aircraft and green aviation applications require detailed aerodynamic shape optimization with constraints to maximize performance. Currently we are streamlining SU² and improving file i/o for parallel solutions in addition to adding CGNS and Tecplot binary output file capability. In addition, we are working to complete time-accurate farfield boundary conditions and developing a time-spectral solution capability for rotorcraft applications.

Aniket C. Aranake

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

I've worked on implementing and validating the axisymmetric terms for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and I have also contributed to the documentation, tutorials and the regression test strategy. Currently, I am working on implementing a three-equation turbulence model which can capture free transition. This correlation based model, known as SA-γ-RE_θ, augments the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model with two additional transport equations. I have previously shown in other work that this model captures the effects of transitional flow on wind turbine blades very well, and it will be a very useful addition to the SU² suite.

Alejandro Campos

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

I have contributed to the implementation of the generalized non-dimensionalization used in the code and I monitored and updated the turbulence modeling capabilities of the code (including dome details of the code structure). Specifically, I'm in charge of the implementation of the k-ω SST turbulence model in SU², and the regression testing methodology based on in-home python scripts and Cruisecontrol. In parallel I have also made contributions to the documentation and RANS tutorials.

Sean R. Copeland

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

My contributions to the SU² software suite are in the multi-species plasma solver, particularly in the N₂, O₂, 5 and 7 species Air gas chemistry models. These gas chemistry models allow for the excitation of vibrational energy states within polyatomic molecules. As a consequence, a re-definition of the energy equation, and the inclusion of additional convection equations for vibrational energy of each polyatomic species is necessary. To account for the exchange of mass, momentum, energy, and vibrational energy between constituents of the multi-species flow many additional source terms are required, and much of his current and future work focuses on properly representing the physical phenomena of these molecular interactions in the SU² solver. My medium-term research goals include an implementation of the adjoint solver for the plasma equations, enabling goal-oriented mesh adaptation and error estimation, and the inclusion of a sub-grid scale molecular dynamics solver to perform multi-scale simulations of these flows and a direct simulation of the molecular interactions in the regions of highest nonequilibrium.

Thomas D. Economon

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

My developmental focus includes both important general purpose structures in SU² (i.e. multi-zone capabilities, I/O subroutines including support for the CGNS format, and restart file handling), as well as research-driven contributions. My research goals involving aerodynamic design in rotating and unsteady flows have required the development/implementation of: • The rotating frame formulation (direct and adjoint solver). • The unsteady solver (direct and adjoint) with dynamic meshes. • Aeroacoustic direct and adjoint solver. • New boundary conditions (periodic and characteristic-based inlet and outlet BCs for both the direct and adjoint problems). Currently, I’m developing a sliding mesh capability, making improvements in the MPI implementation, and developing adjoint boundary conditions for flow control (characteristic-based).

Amrita K. Lonkar

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

I have contributed to the implementation of the plasma solver in SU² with a very general formulation for simulating reacting-hypersonic flow in any mixture of gases, with any number of species, for applications including entry through atmospheres on different planets. The full implementation includes reacting-Navier-Stokes equations for multiple species using a finite volume discretization and the Gauss's Law using a Galerkin formulation on three dimensional, hybrid meshes. The plasma solver includes a new convergence acceleration technique for steady flows which improves convergence of the different species by several orders of magnitude. I have also verified and validated this coupled solver for high speed ionized flow in Argon with experiments.

Trent W. Lukaczyk

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

Most of the developer work I've done for SU² has been on the python wrapping and mesh manipulation. I iterated on the existing wrappers to increase their robustness to future development, and added important server-like scripts that allow optimizers to treat SU² like a function call on a cluster. I also wrote the pointwise plugin, and STL output function. My main area of research is Multi-disciplinary design optimization of Supersonic Aircraft using response surface and I have validated an tested critical SU² subrotuines in this application.

Santiago Padrón

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

My initial contribution to SU² is in the implementation of an aeroelastic model. A couple of the applications I'm intending in using the aeroelastic model for are: computing flutter boundaries for airfoils and for analyzing vertical axis wind turbines.

Thomas W. R. Taylor

Ph.D. Candidate in the Aero/Astro department

I'm developing the SU² discrete adjoint, and a new design methodology called hybrid adjoint. On the other hand, I have had an important role in the documentation, and website update/maintenance.

Acknowledgements

Francisco Palacios would like to acknowledge the support of the U.S. Department of Energy under the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP), and also thank Prof. Jameson (Stanford) and Prof. Zuazua (BCAM) for helpful discussions and comments. Michael R. Colonno would like to acknowledge Aeroflightdynamics Directorate (AFDD) at NASA Ames Research Center. Aniket C. Aranake would like to acknowledge the support the U.S. Department of Defense, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. Sean R. Copeland would like to thank Mr. and Mrs. John Lillie for their generous contributions to the Stanford Graduate Fellowship program, through which this research was funded. Thomas D. Economon would like to acknowledge U.S. government support under and awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, 32 CFR 168a. Amrita K. Lonkar would like to acknowledge the support from the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Trent W. Lukaczyk would like to thank the support of the NASA Supersonics Project of the NASA Fundamental Aeronautics Program. Thomas W. R. Taylor would like to thank the support of the U.S. Department of Energy under the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP). The SU² (v2.0) developers would also like to thank the following researchers: Jason Hicken (RPI), Carlos Castro (UPM), Alfonso Bueno (University of Oxford), Michael Buonanno (Lockheed-Martin Corporation), Rubén Pérez (Royal Military College of Canada), Gérald Carrier (ONERA), Kedar Naik (Stanford).