Juan Alonso

Juan J. Alonso is the Vance D. and Arlene C. Coffman Professor and the James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford University. Prof. Alonso is also the founder and director of the Aerospace Design Laboratory (ADL) where he specializes in the development of high-fidelity computational analysis and design methodologies to enable the creation of realizable and efficient aerospace systems. He is the author of over 300 technical publications on the topics of computational aircraft and spacecraft design, multi-disciplinary optimization, fundamental numerical methods, and high-performance parallel computing. During the period spanning 2006-09, Prof. Alonso was the Director of the NASA Fundamental Aeronautics Program in Washington, DC. In that position he was responsible for the entire portfolio of aerospace vehicle and vehicle technology research for the agency in the subsonic rotary wing, subsonic fixed wing, supersonic, and hypersonic regimes, with particular emphasis on the energy and fuel efficiency of the aviation enterprise and its environmental impact. Prof. Alonso is also the CTO and Co-founder of Luminary Cloud, Inc., a startup company focused on leveraging GPU computing and cloud-based resources and infrastructure to revolutionize simulation-based analysis and design of engineered products.

Prof. Alonso is the recipient of several AIAA Best Paper Awards, the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal, the NASA ARMD Associate Administrator Award, and the AIAA Stanford Chapter Professor of the Year award. Prof. Alonso has served in the NASA Advisory Council, the Secretary of Transportation’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee, the FAA Administrator’s Management Advisory Council, and as an Independent Expert in the ICAO/CAEP fuel burn, noise, and emissions technology goals evaluation. Prof. Alonso and the ADL are responsible for initiating the development of the open-source SU2 analysis and design environment, intended for use by the worldwide community to advance the state-of-the-art in numerical optimization of problems governed by fluid flows. Prof. Alonso earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keynote 4: Making NASA’s Vision 2030 CFD a Reality 6 Years Early

Implications for the Power & Propulsion industry

Wednesday, January 15th
17:00 – 17:45 | HG F 30 | Audi Max

Abstract:

NASA’s CFD Vision 2030 document focused on step-change improvements to CFD and physics-based simulation technology to enable multi-physics analysis and design. Many elements of that aspirational vision are about to be achieved significantly ahead of schedule. Leveraging modern GPU and cloud computing technologies, fast, accurate, robust, and repeatable individual simulations are becoming increasingly available and affordable. Based on my experience as one of the co-authors of the original study and our efforts over the past 10 years, this talk will (a) provide the context of the new software and hardware technologies that are making this acceleration possible, (b) discuss the impact that the past 10 years of simulation improvements can have on engineering problems where ensembles of simulations are required to fully characterize improved designs, and (c) highlight why it matters to faster aerospace innovation. Applications in simulation-based design, uncertainty quantification, and certification by analysis will also be discussed, together with their relevance to the power & propulsion industry. I will conclude this presentation with a personal view of how AI/ML can supercharge product design and optimization workflows … without the hype that is currently pervasive.