Available student project - In space, no-one can hear you scream. Is this true?

Research fields

Project details

Well, perhaps not, and volunteers are difficult to come by, but the general problem of gas being forced through an orifice into a vacuum is extremely important. The question we wish to investigate is: do you need a special nozzle to increase the gas speed to the speed of sound in the throat of the nozzle or will this happen using a simple tube and an appropriate gas flow (as with the fire extinguisher used by Matt Damon in the Martian). We will use Monte Carlo particle-pushing employing multiple CPU cores to investigate this problem. Further extensions will investigate the transition from fluid like flow to “collisionless” molecular flow.

Required background

Basic physics or engineering

Project suitability

This research project can be tailored to suit students of the following type(s)

Contact supervisor

Boswell, Roderick profile