Faculty Profile
Stephen M. Ruffin
Office: Guggenheim 362
Phone: 404.894.8200
Fax: 404.894.2760
stephen.ruffin@aerospace.gatech.edu
http://www.ae.gatech.edu/~sruffin/
Education
- B.S., Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, 1985.
- M.S., Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987.
- Ph.D., Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, 1993.
Biography
Dr. Ruffin is an Associate Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech, Director of NASA’s Georgia Space Grant Consortium, Head of the Aerothermodynamics Research and Technology Laboratory and Chair of the Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics Group. He is a specialist in high temperature gas dynamics, compressible flow aerodynamics, and airframe propulsion integration. He is leading development of a 3-D Cartesian Grid based Navier-Stokes solver for design applications and development of Cartesian-grid approaches for chemically reacting flows. He has developed novel approaches will allow for Navier-Stokes simulations using a purely Cartesian grid solver. His Aerothermodynamics Research and Technology Laboratory applied these techniques to applications as diverse as hypersonic planetary entry vehicles and flow physics, rotorcraft airframe interaction flows, transonic and supersonic missiles and unsteady store separation problems.
Research
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with applications in the following areas:
- Propulsion/airframe integration
- Planetary entry aerothermodynamics
- Cartesian grid based CFD methodologies
- Rotor/fuselage interaction
- Store separation
- Computation of high speed flows in thermo-chemical non-equilibrium
- Drag reduction methods for low-speed and supersonic flight
- Scramjet inlet and exhaust nozzles
