The research group of Professor Boyd is very active in the development and application of physical models and numerical methods for simulation of nonequilibrium gas flows and plasmas. Current application areas include hypersonic aerothermodynamics (i.e. flight of spacecraft at high speeds), electric propulsion (i.e. small rockets used to control spacecraft), and materials processing (i.e. deposition and processing of thin films for semi-conductors). Due to nonequilibrium effects, these flows cannot be computed accurately with the equations of fluid mechanics and plasma physics. Instead, we adopt a microscopic approach in which the molecules in a gas are simulated on the computer by a large number of model particles using sophisticated Monte Carlo methods.
Our research in nonequilibrium gases and plasmas involves development of physical models for the gas systems of interest, development of numerical algorithms on the latest supercomputers, and application to challenging flows in several exciting projects. For example, we are developing new numerical algorithms for large-scale parallel computing platforms such as the IBM SP-2 located in the Cornell Theory Center. We place a great deal of emphasis on comparison of our calculations with external experimental and theoretical results, and have ongoing collaborative studies with several government laboratories and other universities.