Austin Shares in Best Paper Award

The Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has selected AE Assistant Prof. Joanna M. Austin and her co-authors for the 2009 Best Paper Award.

The paper, “Reactant Jetting in Unstable Detonation,” demonstrated the structural equivalence of the supersonic jet occurring in a hypervelocity shock impingement and reaction zone features in gaseous detonation, Austin said. The mechanism for jetting of bulk pockets of unreacted fluid observed in highly unstable detonations was explained.

The paper was presented at the 39th AIAA Fluid Dynamics Conference held in June 2009. Simon Sanderson of General Electric was lead author. Co-authors were Austin, Zhe Liang of AECL Chalk River Laboratories; Florian Pintgen of General Electric Global Research; and Joseph Shepherd and Hans G. Hornung, professor and emeritus professor, respectively, of aeronautics at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, California Institute of Technology. The paper was produced in honor of Hornung’s 75th birthday.

Austin’s research interests are fluid mechanics, compressible flow and combustion. She became a member of the AE faculty in October 2003, after earning her PhD in aeronautical engineering from Caltech. Austin earned a master’s in aeronautics from Caltech in 1997. She earned bachelor’s degrees in mechanical and space engineering and in mathematics both in 1996 from the University of Queensland in Australia.