Welcome to the iDesign Lab!
The iDesign Lab is part of the Aerospace Engineering Department at Iowa State University.
Our vision is to create revolutionary analysis, design, and optimization methods and tools to transform educational and research activities in academia and industry.
Specifically, our research focuses on developing efficient algorithms and software, such as computational fluid dynamics and adjoint solvers, to understand the fundamental behavior of multidisciplinary engineering systems and to facilitate their design. The applications include aerodynamic, heat transfer, structural, and hydrodynamic analysis, design, and optimization for next-generation land, air, sea, and space vehicles, as well as improving long-range laser communication through deep turbulence. See details of the past and ongoing projects.
We have developed an efficient adjoint-based optimization framework (DAFoam) to handle general engineering design problems, as well as a massively-parallel direct numerical simulation solver (Hercules) to predict and understand small-scale turbulence characteristics under stably stratified conditions. Both of these codes are open source.
Our research is supported by the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Department of Energy.
News
Oct. 10, 2024Gaga Harris passed his PhD prelim exam. Congratulations!
April. 19, 2024Lean Fang passed his PhD prelim exam, and Khanh and Sherly passed their MS final exams. Congratulations!
April. 17, 2024Our paper, Field inversion machine learning augmented turbulence modeling for time-accurate unsteady flow [doi], was published in Physics of Fluids!
Feb. 11, 2024Our paper, A Duality-Preserving Adjoint Method for Segregated Navier-Stokes Solvers [doi], was published in Journal of Computational Physics!
Dec. 20, 2023Our paper, Control Co-Design Optimization of Spacecraft Trajectory and System for Interplanetary Missions [doi], was published in Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets!