On a spring day at University of Florida, I walked from Professor Haftka’s office, now my own. Up the small rise from aerospace, near the student union and under the trees, I made my way to class. Years of developing the Navier–Stokes equations for aerospace students, joined by mathematics students. The room held thirty, yet …
Author Archives: saemiller
Leaves
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the …
Remembering Dennis Bushnell
I received word via the NASA Alumni Association that Dennis Bushnell passed away. Dennis Bushnell was a long-serving Chief Scientist of NASA Langley Research Center. I remember meeting him for the first time when there was internal research funding available at NASA for researchers. I wrote a proposal on fluid thrust factoring of a particular …
GE Aerospace and New York
I recently started in September a new position at General Electric Aerospace at the Research Center in Niskayuna, New York. This is a post that came a bit late because of the move to New York State and all the other details that come with starting a new job. I am working as a Technical …
High-Order CFD for Validating Analytical Solution of the Navier-Stokes Equations – ‘BlackJack’
The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code, ‘BlackJack,’ was created with a singular purpose: to generate extremely accurate numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations in support of a broader program to develop new analytical solutions to those same equations. Unlike general-purpose CFD tools designed for industrial applications or engineering approximations, BlackJack CFD is a research code, …
Olaf O. Storaasli
Recently I lost a friend, Olaf O. Storaasli, Ph.D., due to medical complications. I first met him through the NASA Langley Alumni Association after giving a lecture titled Life After Academics. Although we did not overlap during my time at NASA, we connected through shared experiences. Later, he and his wife visited Florida, and I …
Univ. Mich Art Exhibit
Today I attended the University of Michigan Art Exhibit on North Campus, which featured thousands of works by prisoners in the state of Michigan. The event serves both as a charity and as a program designed to provide the incarcerated with a creative outlet and a means of connecting with the broader community. The artwork …
Education, Frederick Douglass
To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being. Frederick Douglass
Maxwell
No I don’t. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell. Einstein when he was told he stood on Newton’s shoulders.
New Position
Today I started my new position as the Senior Scientific Technical Manager (SSTM) for Hypersonics at the US Navy’s Naval Air Warfare Center (NAWCAD).